Bank of Korea

Roll-on/Roll-off (RoRo) ships are designed for direct loading and unloading of wheeled cargo without the use of cranes. During a voyage with sequential port calls, the path of cargo handled at a specific port may be blocked by other cargoes. This results in unnecessary operations, known as rehandling, which relocate other cargoes to reserve a path for the blocked cargoes. Minimizing rehandling significantly reduces cargo handling costs, and this problem is defined as the NP-hard RoRo Ship Stowage Problem (RSSP). This study proposes a backtracking-based algorithm to reduce rehandling in the RSSP effectively. The key components of the proposed method are as follows: (i) a ship structure model based on disjoint subgraphs that cargoes in conflict relationship can be assigned without rehandling, (ii) a cargo ordering strategy that accounts for inter-cargo relationships defined by handling ports and total volume of related cargoes, (iii) a backtracking-based Conflict Free Block (CFB) selection strategy capable of incorporating multiple evaluation metrics, and (iv) a post-processing strategy for partitioning rehandled cargo. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method reduces rehandling instances by up to 65% compared to existing methods under various loading scenarios. In practical terms, this can be interpreted as an approximate 18% reduction in the total number of cargo handling operations.

The Korea Chemical Bank (KCB) has generated a dataset containing metabolic stability data for approximately 4,000 compounds that have been tested on human and mouse liver microsomes. The first South Korea Data Challenge, named the Jump AI Challenge for Drug Discovery (JUMPAI 2023), was opened using the metabolic stability data of KCB in 2023. The objective of the JUMP AI 2023 was to promote and encourage the development of new drugs using artificial intelligence (AI) technology in South Korea. A total of 1254 teams participated in the competition, developing algorithms to estimate the remaining percentage of compounds after 30min of incubation with human and mouse livermicrosomes. The data set comprised training and test sets of 3498 and 483 compounds, respectively. This paper provides an overview of the JUMP AI 2023 and its outcomes, highlighting the diverse range of algorithms and artificial intelligence technologies employed by the competing teams. Among these, five teams stood out by utilizing GNN-based approaches winning awards. This competition was the first AI competition for drug discovery in South Korea, attracting numerous researchers and playing a key role in promoting drug research through the application of artificial intelligence technologies.

This study investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on clinically diagnosed depression in South Korea, focusing on gender disparities and structural risk factors such as job loss and childcare burden. Although mental health inequalities have received growing attention during the pandemic, most existing research relies on self-reported survey data with inherent limitations. To address this gap, we utilized administrative health data from a 2% stratified random sample of the total population (N = 297,368) in the National Health Insurance Database, focusing on employed individuals without a prior history of depression. Multivariable Cox proportional hazard regression revealed that women had higher risks of depression than men, particularly among those in their 20s to 40s, those who experienced job loss, those who had children aged 7–9, and those who belonged to high-income groups. These findings suggest that the intersection of employment instability and caregiving responsibilities disproportionately affected women’s mental health during the pandemic. The results underscore the urgent need for gender-sensitive public health policies that expand childcare support, institutionalize flexible work arrangements such as telecommuting, and enhance access to targeted mental health services to reduce pandemic-induced gender disparities in mental health.

Tobacco use remains one of the most preventable causes of disease and death globally, yet it continues to impose enormous health and economic burdens on societies.1,2 While taxation and regulation have been the cornerstone of tobacco control, a new frontier is emerging, public cost recovery litigation. South Korea’s National Health Insurance Service (NHIS) has brought one of the region’s first and most closely watched legal challenges against major tobacco firms, seeking ₩53.3 billion (USD 38–40 million) in reimbursement for cancer treatment costs.

Non-invasive genetic approaches, particularly using fecal samples, are commonly used to study endangered and elusive species, as they are easy to collect with minimal permission and cause little disturbance to the subject population. However, such studies face limitations due to poor DNA yield, which affects the overall utilization of collected samples and increases data errors. Here, we evaluated the impact of sample age and collection season on the performance of DNA extracted from feces (spraints) of the Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra), a semi-aquatic apex predator in South Korean freshwater ecosystems. We found that PCR amplification success rates decreased more rapidly in summer (79.3-58.2%) compared to winter (99.2-84.8%) with extended environmental exposure. Genotyping error rates were higher in samples collected during summer, with the rate of error increase over time being significantly greater in summer than in winter. The hot and humid South Korean summer fosters microbial growth and fecal degradation, which negatively impacts DNA yield, reducing PCR amplification success and increasing genotyping errors. We recommend collecting otter feces during winter for better DNA quality. If sampling in summer is unavoidable, it is crucial to collect fresh samples, which can be facilitated by conducting frequent surveys of latrine sites.