DGIST · School of Undergraduate Studies · Fall 2026

Physical AI for Everyone

Seminar for Comprehensive Competency Cultivation (SCCC) · HSS118 · 1 credit · Fridays 13:00–14:00 KST · E7-233

Why the center of gravity in AI is moving from systems that talk to systems that see, understand, decide, and act. Robot learning comes first; hardware, control, and mechanics follow late in the semester.

A personal companion page. The schedule below covers the full term; slides and recordings are for the sessions I teach, host, or co-run. Official announcements, assignments, deadlines, and grades live on the DGIST LMS.

Sessions

Assessment update — October 5: There are no separate midterm or final exams or reports. Written assessment uses the weekly reflection essays for the eight designated talks. Attendance requirements continue to apply; official grading and submission details are announced on the DGIST LMS.

Aug 28 Special lecture on AI Opening session, arranged by DGIST. DGIST

Sep 4 The Paradigm Shift Toward Embodied AI Foundation models conquered language and images. Why action became the next frontier, and the map for everything that follows. Lecture Slides Recording

Sep 11 Invited talk Video Foundation Models and World Models Hyeongmin Lee, Assistant Professor, SeoulTech Delivered remotely. Slides Recording

Sep 18 Leadership talk Arranged by DGIST; speaker announced on the LMS. DGIST

Sep 25 No class — Chuseok holiday No class

Oct 2 Action as a New Modality and the Scaling of Robot Learning Data Action treated as a data modality, and why robot data does not grow on its own the way web text and images did. Lecture Slides Recording

Oct 9 No class — Hangul Day No class

Oct 16 Midterm week — no class or separate assignment No midterm exam or report. Written assessment is covered by the weekly reflection essays for the eight designated talks; see the LMS for submission details. No class

Oct 23 From Experience to Action: How Robots Learn How robots turn demonstrations and trial-and-error experience into action, connecting action generation, generalist policies, world models, and planning. Lecture Slides Recording

Oct 30 Leadership talk on entrepreneurship Arranged by DGIST. DGIST

Nov 6 Invited talk Spatial AI to Physical AI Sunghwan Hong, Post-doc researcher, ETH Zurich Delivered remotely. Slides Recording

Nov 13 Leadership talk Arranged by DGIST; speaker announced on the LMS. DGIST

Nov 20 Foundations of Robot Hardware, Control, and Modern Platforms How hardware, control, and mechanics turn a learned policy into physical motion. Lecture Slides Recording

Nov 27 Ethics, Safety, and Social Responsibility in the Age of Embodied AI What changes once an AI system has a body and acts in the physical world: the new risk surface, labor, alignment, and privacy. Lecture Slides Recording

Dec 4 Closing keynote The Physical AI Megatrend and the Coming Industrial Revolution Chris (Hongseop) Choi, CEO, Maum AI An industry view of the market, the jobs, and the corporate strategy that acting AI is about to reshape. Delivered by my co-instructor on this course. Slides Recording

Dec 11 Final week — no class or separate assignment No final exam or synthesis essay. Written assessment is covered by the weekly reflection essays for the eight designated talks; see the LMS for submission details. No class

What this page covers

The Seminar for Comprehensive Competency Cultivation (SCCC, course code HSS118) is a required general-education course for first- and second-year students at DGIST, co-taught across a full sixteen-week term. This fall it is taught as Physical AI for Everyone. The schedule above lists every week so the shape of the term is visible at a glance. The eight highlighted sessions are the ones I lecture, host, or co-run; the weeks marked DGIST are arranged by the school. Written assessment consists of the eight weekly reflection essays, with no separate midterm or final exam or report.

Sessions assume no prior background in robotics or machine learning. Technical terms are introduced in plain language first, and every acronym is spelled out the first time it appears.

Slides and recordings

Links appear next to each session as material becomes available. Slides are published as web decks; recordings are released selectively. Material for invited sessions is published only where the speaker has agreed to it.

Contact

Course questions belong on the LMS so that every student sees the answer. For anything else, reach me at sung@maum.ai.