Yeon Sam-heum, Ph.D.

He enjoys imagining things, and he enjoys turning those things into reality even more. At the threshold of what Confucius called the age of knowing one's heaven-given purpose (知天命), he sits at his desk most nights and studies coding together with an AI — quietly testing the old saying that the moment one feels too late is, in fact, the earliest one can begin.

He earned his doctorate in Business Administration with a focus on Healthcare Welfare Management from Seokyeong University Graduate School, preceded and followed by undergraduate degrees in Health Administration, Information Security, Beauty & Health Design, Disaster Safety, Wealth Management, and Financial Asset Management. The breadth is deliberate: tools meant to serve people must cross academic boundaries, just as people's lives do.

He serves as President of the World Industry Association of Certification (WIA), President of KAITRUST (Korea AI Promotion Association), and President of the Korea Blockchain Industry Association (KBCIA). For seventeen years he has served as CEO of SmileStory Inc., and concurrently as director of the WIA Lifelong Education Institute, publisher of Korean Today, and CEO of WIA Book. Yet titles, he says, matter less than the daily promises kept with each individual reader, user, and student.

His life motto is plain: "Acquire the most advanced technologies of humanity, and share them with those who need them, to benefit all humanity." This is the spirit of Hongik Ingan (弘益人間) — a foundational Korean ethic of universal human benefit — re-inscribed onto the technologies of the twenty-first century. It has been the steady direction of his work for nearly three decades.

Each time he builds something, he asks himself the same question: "Will this actually reach the hands of those who need it?" Long before AI and blockchain became fashionable terms, his work focused on tools that allow ordinary people — those without scale, capital, or technical staff — to achieve their own digital self-reliance.

When things do not go as planned, he returns to a line from Mencius: "When you act and do not attain, turn back and seek within yourself (行有不得 反求諸己)." Before blaming the world, he first looks for the place where his own action has been insufficient. He follows no single religion, yet keeps lit, as small lamps along the way, any sentence from any scripture that opens itself toward another human being.

This book is one such promise, written down. May it help you meet your own lighthouse — small, but unshakable. Technology carries the warmth of those who make it. May that warmth reach you, too, through these pages.

"Though your beginning was small, yet your latter end shall greatly increase" (Job 8:7). "Indeed, with hardship comes ease" (Qur'an 94:6). Knowing early that all phenomena finally pass, he keeps walking with diligence, one step further, today as well.