Composed of students from the College of Engineering's Division of Electronic Engineering, the "THINCAR" team (Song Ji-min, Seo Hyun-myeong, On Min-kwon, Shin Ji-yeon, Jeong Jin-woo; supervising professor Sang-jun Lee) received the LG Electronics President's Award at the 19th Embedded Software Competition.

These students formed a team through the E2 System Design Track, which the Division of Electronic Engineering supports as part of the University Innovation Support Project to enhance student competitiveness.

The competition was hosted by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and organized by the Embedded Software and Systems Industry Association. It was a nationwide contest with six categories—Open Call, Intelligent Humanoid, webOS, 4th Industrial Revolution-Based Energy, Industry–Academia Project, and Teen Makers Challenge—and ran from April to November.

The THINCAR team entered the webOS category, sponsored by LG Electronics. They built a webOS-based system in line with the theme "Development of a webOS-based Car 2 Smart Home Solution," designing it to utilize the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI).

The system the students designed not only controls power to home appliances from the vehicle via IoT, but also automatically recognizes visitors at the front door (visitor detection) in the smart home and detects ingredients inside the refrigerator (object detection) to recommend menus based on a database.

In the vehicle, the system was designed to convert speech to text or text to speech (Text-to-Speech, Speech-to-Text) and to recognize the driver’s gaze (gaze detection) to monitor drowsy driving, features that received high evaluations.

Student Song Ji-min said, "Aiming to design a system that brings convenience to everyday life by using IoT and AI—which will lead future society—we worked hard under Professor Sang-jun Lee's guidance for the past year and seem to have achieved a satisfying result. Because the E2 System Design Track brought together people with the same interests into one team and we achieved good results, I want to celebrate together with everyone."