The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) achieved notable results in the international standardization sector last year, even amidst the new contactless-centered ICT research and development environment caused by COVID-19.

ETRI announced that it secured 85 international standard patents last year, bringing its total accumulated international standard patents to 1,017.

It was also mentioned that 31 international standards were established and 42 contributions were made to reflect ETRI's international standard patents.

This achievement is attributed to the full-cycle standardization strategy centered on de facto standardization activities, which ETRI recently pursued as part of its organizational transformation efforts.

ETRI significantly strengthened its de facto standardization activities as a strategy to maximize the market utility of standardization results, achieving great results such as obtaining approval for the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) technology standard for real-time video streaming from the IETF, a de facto standard organization for internet technology.

The actual standard performance in 2021 increased by about 20% compared to the previous year.

International standard patents recently secured by ETRIIt includes a number of commercial standard patents with high market demand, such as 64 in the field of next-generation video compression standards (VVC) and 48 in the field of 5G mobile communication (NR), and significant patent royalties are expected in the future.

In addition, it includes numerous technologies referred to as core technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, such as artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing, the Internet of Things, and blockchain.

In particular, as a comprehensive national research institute for intelligence, ETRI has played a significant role in the international standardization sector related to artificial intelligence.

ETRI is expanding Korea's influence within the organization by appointing a Vice Chair as a founding member of MPAI, a global de facto standard organization for artificial intelligence technology.

In addition, it is leading the development of related technical standards and has achieved significant results, such as establishing an AI-related group and assuming the chairmanship at the W3C, a de facto standard organization for web standards development.

It has been selected as a specialized research laboratory for artificial intelligence standards by the Ministry of Science and ICT and is taking the lead in the field of international standardization of artificial intelligence, such as by proposing the establishment of a Joint Coordination Group (JCA-ML) for machine learning standardization to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T).

In addition, it established four international standards for the manufacturing technology framework applying digital twins, which is the world's first international standard related to digital twins, and standards such as requirements for spatial wireless power transfer systems, which are of great industrial interest, thereby making a significant contribution to the activation of ICT convergence services.

“Despite COVID-19, ETRI’s Head of the Standards Research Division, Kang Shin-gak, carried out active activities, such as attending approximately 400 international standardization meetings remotely over the past year, and ETRI’s international standardization achievements are expanding into various fields including artificial intelligence, 5G, data, the Internet of Things, and cloud computing. "We will continue to dedicate ourselves to playing a leading role in international standardization for core ICT technologies and convergence technologies in line with the government's policy direction this year to realize the Digital New Deal," he stated.

ETRI plans to further strengthen these R&D-patent-standard-open source linkage activities to ensure that developed standards are widely utilized in the market. This will be achieved not only by establishing R&D results as standard technologies but also by actively promoting inter-ministerial and open-source-linked standard development activities that consider user requirements and industrial applications.