Amid Repeated 'Plagiarism' Allegations, Nominee Im Hye-sook Says "Not True" (Comprehensive)

On the 26th, People Power Party lawmakers raised concerns... Candidate Lim's side denies "No issues"

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Bong-su] Im Hye-sook, nominee for Minister of Science and ICT, has officially denied allegations of plagiarism in her research papers.

On the 26th, Heo Eun-ah, a member of the People Power Party, issued a press release claiming, "There is evidence that nominee Im listed her student's research as part of her and her husband's research achievements while serving as a professor." During her professorship, in July 2004, nominee Im submitted a paper titled "Weighted Binary Prefix Tree for IP Address Lookup," co-authored with her student A and her husband, Professor Im Chang-hoon, as the first author. The paper was published in November of the same year. The issue is that the main content explaining the "Weighted Binary Prefix Tree (WBPT)" method in that paper is virtually identical to parts of student A's master's thesis, which was submitted in January of the following year.

According to Representative Heo, the section proposing WBPT in nominee Im's paper is merely a Korean translation of the WBPT explanation from student A's master's thesis, with formulas, definitions, and notation all matching exactly. Heo stated, "It appears that nominee Im Hye-sook, her husband, and the student plagiarized the research content with mutual consent, publishing it first in an academic journal with the husband as first author, nominee Im as second author, and the student as third author." He added, "It is also highly suspicious that the nominee's husband, a professor at Konkuk University, conducted joint research with a student enrolled at Ewha Womans University graduate school. We will thoroughly investigate these allegations through the confirmation hearing."

On the same day, Kim Young-sik, also from the same party, raised similar suspicions. In September 2007, nominee Im published a paper titled "Two-Dimensional Binary Search for Packet Classification Structure Based on Length" in an academic journal (The Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences). However, this paper closely resembles a master's thesis submitted by a student whom nominee Im supervised and examined in December 2006, nine months earlier. The student who submitted this master's thesis was B, who was listed as the first author in the paper published by nominee Im the following year. The paper titled "Two-Dimensional Binary Search Based on Length Considering Rule Priority for Packet Classification" dealt with content almost identical to the paper published by nominee Im nine months later. Particularly, except for one or two sentences, the conclusion sections were identical, according to Representative Kim.

In fact, from the introduction stating, "As demands for quality assurance on the internet increase, packet classification functions in routers are becoming increasingly important," to the sentence, "(The strategy) enabled more efficient searching," four consecutive sentences were exactly the same. Moreover, nominee Im reportedly received support from a national research institute (Information and Communications Technology Promotion Institute, IITA) when publishing the paper, which has intensified the controversy.

In response, nominee Im's side stated that "there is no significant problem." A member of the confirmation hearing preparation team explained Heo's claims by saying, "The nominee and her spouse wrote the paper seven months earlier, and student A borrowed ideas to write their master's thesis."

They also officially denied Representative Kim's allegations. Late in the evening, nominee Im's side issued a press release stating, "It is not true that the academic journal paper similar to the student's thesis was written to receive government support." From 2004 to 2012, nominee Im participated as a research associate with students in the project "Next-Generation Home Network Middleware Architecture and Security Technology Research," part of the "University IT Research Center Development Support Project," supported by IITA. Student B, mentioned in the article, also participated in this research and submitted their master's thesis in December 2006, two years later. Nominee Im said, "Subsequently, in March 2007, I co-authored and submitted the academic journal paper, which Representative Kim raised concerns about, with the student as the first author, based on the student's master's thesis," denying the plagiarism allegations.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.