Fourth-year Department of Computer Science & Engineering students Heo Nam-gyu, Hwang Ji-young, Kim Hye-in and Lee Se-jin (supervisor: Professor Koo Myoung-wan) received the Excellence Award in the undergraduate division of the Undergraduate/Junior Paper Competition at the Korean Institute of Information Scientists and Engineers' Korea Software Congress 2020, held online from 21 to 23 December 2020.

The Korean Institute of Information Scientists and Engineers conference (KSC 2020) is an information science and technology conference at which the latest research results across every area of information technology — artificial intelligence, computer systems, information security and high-assurance computing and more — are presented. The paper is titled 'A Task-Specific Data Augmentation Technique for Full-Page Korean Handwriting Recognition'. To generate data for research on full-page Korean handwriting recognition, the paper proposes a method of synthesizing handwriting for phrases from existing Korean text corpora by joining together character-level handwriting images. It further presents Letterwise Handwriting Augmentation (LHWA), a task-specific data augmentation technique that, taking account of the characteristics of handwriting data, synthesizes data closely resembling real human handwriting through various transformations at the character, word and line levels. By demonstrating high accuracy and performance, the research is expected to contribute to Hangul Handwriting Recognition (HHR), an active area of AI research.