An Inspiring Story of One Man from a Poor Rural Village in Cambodia to a Professor in the Silicon Valley--A Member of the Khmer STEM Global Network

The interview below was adopted from the Maeil Business Newspaper publication

The journey...​

"I think I've come this far as I've gone step by step, dreaming of a wider future. I couldn't have done it without Korea's help."

"There was a boy who was born and raised in a poor rural village in Cambodia. He helped with field work during the farming season and sold fish and fruits on his free days, but now he is a professor who studies artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) in the heart of Silicon Valley, working on research and nurturing his younger students. Professor Butea Cheang, the first Cambodian to be appointed to San Jose State University, a prestigious U.S. state university, in July, is the main character.Professor Cheang was the second of six siblings and was born in Kampong Travek, a small rural village about 90 km from Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital. "My father drove a motorcycle taxi, and my mother made a living by selling fish and fruits," Professor Cheang recalled. "My parents are of a generation that suffered from war and massacre, and they worked hard with the belief that they should study their children even though they were not properly educated."

The small desktop computer my uncle bought me in high school became the first turning point in Professor Cheang's life. My curiosity grew by fiddling with computers, and I decided to go to college and study computers in earnest. Professor Cheang entered the Royal Phnom Penh University, Cambodia's top university. During the day, he worked as an editorial assistant at an information technology (IT) magazine and wrote, and continued his four-year life of taking night classes from 5 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. in the evening. "After the second grade, I worked as a web development intern and collected my salary to buy a small laptop," he said.Another opportunity came for him, who was about to graduate. It was an HRD center established in Cambodia by Korean IT company Webkesy. The HRD Center is an institution established in Phnom Penh in 2013 to train software (SW) experts, and it selects IT students from prestigious universities through rigorous tests and intensively trains them with IT-related skills such as Java and databases for a year. It provides employment opportunities by transferring Korea's SW technology to excellent IT majors in Cambodia. Professor Cheang said, "I remember the time when I rode a motorcycle and memorized Korean words for Korean classes."

He was noticed by Kim Tae-kyung, a professor at Chungbuk National University who was the director of the HRD center, and after graduating from the HRD center, he went on to a master's program in the Department of Computer Science at Chungbuk National University. Professor Cheang said, "As Cambodia suffered from the war and is still having a hard time, I really wanted to visit Korea, which has grown rapidly through education after the war," and added, "Thanks to the HRD center, I was able to realize my dream of studying abroad and visiting Korea."After completing his master's degree, he was also offered to enter a doctoral program in Korea, but he moved to Magdeburg University in Germany because he wanted to study in the wider world. After doing medical VR research here, he moved to the United States as soon as he received his doctorate. After working as a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, he was appointed as a professor of computer science at San Jose State University in July this year.

Currently, he is conducting research to incorporate extended reality (XR) and human-computer interaction (HCI) into medical-related technologies. In Germany, VR for surgical training related to liver and biliary tract was developed, and in Livermore, digital twins were studied. When a VR headset is worn by combining the two technologies after becoming a professor, AI assistants present improvement measures related to the medical situation, and experts join the virtual space to develop a medical collaboration platform to help solve problems.He reiterated the power of education throughout the interview. Just as Korea has been growing rapidly through education, he stressed that education is a bridge to go wider. Professor Cheang said, "I want to return the precious opportunity I received to students," adding, "I want to lead students to realize the true value of education and use new technologies such as AI in the right way."