Hello from Shanghai! My new career started in Stokke

After I finished my study in KAIST last year, I had to decide my next career like all the colleague students. I could take a rest for a while or have a break to continue my study again. There were plenty of ways I could choose, I believe. Nothing was easy to decide… and one of them was obviously becoming the indie game developer for few years. It could be good opportunity actually- after all my journey in office life.

Well.. as a result, I decided to join Stokke in Shanghai, China. To be honest, it was quite big decision for me living in Korea. Stokke is the company selling baby products which means I needed to change my career from the game developer to software engineer, and of course I had to move to Shanghai where I’ve never lived before abroad. It was tough decision indeed.. however, I saw lots of opportunities here, so I decided to join Stokke. Now I’m living in Shanghai, and the start member of Tech Lab of Stokke in China.

Stokke is a company well-known as Trip Trapp, its premium strollers and high chairs with other baby products such as baby carriers or home furniture for baby. Its heritage comes from Norway, and Stokke is the one of companies representing Scandinavian design delicately in the world.

… “Founded on the west coast of Norway, over eighty years ago, Stokke® began life as a manufacturer of high quality Scandinavian furniture. Since launching the revolutionary Tripp Trapp® chair in 1972, we have evolved into a company that focuses exclusively on premium design for children. Today, we are recognized for timeless Scandinavian design that brings you and your child closer.” … from “A History of Innovation” of about Stokke in stoke.com

There are already a lot of IoT products out there even for baby products in the market. So, it might be natural Stokke decided to have its own R&D center at this moment. Especially in Shanghai, it’s very easy to find experienced co-operative partners and suppliers for our products. Shanghai is the one of biggest well-developed industrial cities which have an excellent IT and financial infrastructure for co-operations. We don’t have only partners here but also plenty of potential customers who are already very used to using IoT products.

I‘m in charge of designing and developing software here. All the IoT products need its own specific firmware embedded inside MCU of microcontroller board, and it also needs an application to control itself. I develop and manage all the software by myself for our project, and try to find the best hardware and platform for us. Luckily, we have lots of partners who can help us to develop and support our project in Shanghai already, so it’s very fascinating to be a software engineer here focusing into more creative stuff.

Our mission here is researching and developing creative and challenging products for baby to make people closer to their adorable babies. I believe our team can make better world while our products keep its natural characters based on Scandinavian design. For Stokke, it’s very important to keep this indeed, and to be honest, I’m surprised that we have lots of benefits when we have nature friendly and human-centered design for baby product in daily life. It’s not only good for parents but also your babies.

I hope one day we get a design award in Baby Tech which is the biggest contest in baby industry of CES Las Vegas.

Stokke® Designed to be closer | Tripp Trapp® Xplory® Flexi Bath®

PICKME! SNS for Indecisiveness

Last spring semester, I developed a SNS application called PICKME! for indecisiveness with my teammates as a project in the class of KAIST CS408 Computer Science Project. This project aimed to help people who want to resolve their indecisive issues by asking to massive users who experienced similar issues or just asking their opinions via votes or comments.

“How can we resolve their issues effectively?”

Our goal was the developing a mobile service application for end users and recommender system to recommend personalized contents so that users can easily find their similar or interested issues and resolve their indecisive issues which they might be interested.

Key Features

1) Post a card that user want to share to resolve his/her issue
2) Participate vote to share his/her opinions
3) Communicate via comments to share his/her thought
4) Explorer and get recommended contents from recommender system

We used Unity for a client application for Android and iOS platforms, and Firebase and Django for database and server networking. We also extracted and analyzed 15,000+ tweets to test our recommender system based on collaborative filtering with LDA topics. To measure our project, we did a survey to KAIST members with the mobile application as a beta testing.

References

[1] Paul Covington, Jay Adams, Emre Sargin, “Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommendations”, in 2016
[2] CARLOS A. GOMEZ-URIBE and NEIL HUNT, Netflix, Inc., “The Netflix Recommender System: Algorithms, Business Value, and Innovation”
[3] Michael Hahsler, “recommenderlab: A Framework for Developing and Testing Recommendation Algorithms”
[4] P.Selvaperumal, Dr.A.Suruliandi, “SHORT MESSAGE CLASSIFICATION ALGORITHM FOR TWEET CLASSIFICATION”, in 2014 International Conference on Recent Trends in Information Technology

Go Back to School

Hello, everybody! Long time no see! 😀

It seems like forever since I last updated my news here. First of all, I resigned from last work almost six months ago. I finished my duty as military service, and I went back to school from this Fall semester to finish my bachelor’s degree. It’s been a really long time because I was on break from school for seven whole years. This is so challenging. I have to attend school for two more years, jeez. I already miss my friends that I was working with.

I haven’t decided yet, now I am thinking of the job as an indie game developer or just application developer. I know it’s not easy; taking classes with working at same time. The point is that I will keep creating programming work to maximize my development skills. To my great joy, there are a lot of great students in my school, KAIST. It is one of the great school in Korea, and I am so looking forward to working with them when I get a chance soon.

To sum up, eight years ago I operated my own company MindPol for more than three years, I was one of founder mentors from SW Maestro in 2010, I worked for NXC, which is a holding company of Nexon, as a team manager from app. development center for one and a half years, I also worked for ESTsoft as a mobile game developer for three years, and now I’m back to my school finally! It’s been a long road, and I believe I will just keep going as long as I can.

So, keep in touch with my website and I hope you enjoy the end of this year! 🙂

(KAIST Campus, Photograph by ROHS, Posted at Ara 2015/12/16)