Hyunje Park

Hyunje Park’s guiding story about technology is almost 800 years old. In the year 1234, the first movable metal type was created in Korea. But the technology never reached the general public, which is why the German inventor Johannes Gutenberg is more commonly credited with the invention, although he didn’t come up with it until 200 years later. Gutenberg helped establish the printing press, which, in turn, launched an information revolution. “This taught me that an invention matters only when it becomes part of everyday life,” said Park.

Park’s own story with the Internet began in 1983, as a graduate student at KAIST in Korea. “I saw KAIST connect to another node at just 1200 bps—painfully slow, yet thrilling because it showed that we could talk to the remote site,” recalled Park. Among the first TCP/IP engineers outside the USA and ARPANET community, he wanted Korean and Asian researchers to be able to exchange data and email as easily as their peers in the United States and Europe.

In practice, that played out in a cascade of notable technical contributions, including developing the first IPv4 network in Asia and registering the first Korean IP address in 1986. This accomplishment was marked by an acknowledgement email from Jon Postel himself, and Korean newspapers later called it the moment Korea spoke to the world through the Internet. “Postel’s message was our first step toward a full, direct link to the global Internet, and it remains a very special memory for me,” said Park.

A decade after helping connect Korea to the Internet, Park was poised to make Internet history for a second time by bringing broadband to Korea. But just one month after he embarked on the ambitious project, the 1997 Asian financial crisis struck. Investors pulled back, and previously promising international partners saw more risks than opportunities. Against these daunting odds, Park and his team at Thrunet were successful in the span of just eight months. “We proved local talent could lead world-class innovation,” recalled Park.

These days, Park is still working to make sure that the promise of the Internet reaches people across the Asia-Pacific region who don’t have access to it, all these decades later. And he is working to better integrate Artificial Intelligence into services to support senior citizens living in remote areas. Never content to think small, he wants to “connect every living thing and object in the world so we can all share information and ‘breathe’ together.”