I have been a professor at Seoul National University in School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science since February 1992. I am also a founder of TIM System, Inc. (also called Transact In Memory, Inc. in Silicon Valley), which developed the next-generation DBMS technology. This new technology has emerged from several years of experimental research on in-memory database. The company was first established in May 2000 as a university lab venture company in Seoul and was reincorporated in Silicon Valley in 2002 to reach the global software market.

Prior to Seoul National University, I worked on an in-memory personal data management project at HP Laboratories, Palo Alto, California from July 1991 to January 1992. Motivated by this experience, I started my own in-memory DB project since I moved to Seoul National University. A few local venture companies were started based on the early prototype developed by my group in the course of trying in-memory DB architecture. Recognizing the inherent limitations of this architecture, my group has thrown away the old code base in 2000 when I setablished Transact In Memory, Inc. to fund the development of the next-generation architecture. This new DBMS architecture, the recent advances in hardware and software. Moore's law tells that the CPU processing power and the memory capacity have improved million times over 30 years since the system R project at IBM, the first relational DBMS development project, started in 1970's. There is serious impedance between today's hardware and software architecture and the existing DBMS implementations with multi-million-line legacy code base. Time has come to take Thomas Kuhn's paradigm shift seriously in data management.

I received my Ph.D. in database systems at Stanford University in 1991 with Gio Wiederhold as advisor. While working for Ph.D. at Stanford, I worked at Computer Science Center of Texas Instruments, Inc. in Dallas for six months in 1985 and at IBM Palo Alto Scientific Center as a consultant in 1990-1991. Prior to Stanford, I worked for DACOM during 1982-1983 as one of early employees with two-digit ID. I received BS in Electrical Engineering and MS in Instrumentation and Control Engineering from Seoul National University, in 1980 and 1982, respectively.

From August 2001 to August 2002, I was visiting the database research group in Computer Science Department of Stanford University, where I organized CS545 database seminar in the Fall and Spring quarters, inviting prominent speakers in the industry and academia. From September 2002 to February 2003, I was on unpaid leave from Seoul National University to set up TIM System, Inc. in Silicon Valley.

In November 2005, SAP acquired TIM System, Inc. and transformed it to a dedicated R&D Center on business data management and intelligence platform. SAP R&D Center Korea was officially announced on March 25, 2008 by SAP and Korean government providing partial funding for SAP's R&D Center establishment.