StellarCube supports an AI cultural facility valuation service through Hansung University's capstone design program

StellarCube, a specialist in AI and data, continued its industry–academia capstone design projects in the first semester of 2026, following on from the second semester of 2025, under the memorandum of understanding on training AI digital marketing specialists signed with Hansung University.

The project was VALUE TRIP, carried out by POPOI, a team of four students from Hansung University's Department of Applied AI. Its goal was to develop an AI-based web service that quantifies the social value of 21 cultural facilities in Seongsu-dong and provides personalized recommendations.

The team chose Seongsu-dong, one of the most closely watched cultural and commercial districts in Seoul, as the area of analysis. With pop-up stores, exhibitions, multi-purpose cultural spaces and local brands concentrated there, visitor numbers and commercial interest are rising quickly, making it a suitable case for analyzing the relationship between cultural facility value and the local commercial district through data.

VALUE TRIP was conceived to address the limitations of existing cultural facility recommendation services, which lean heavily on commercial indicators such as reviews, ratings and popularity. The team defined cultural facility value along four axes — diversity, accessibility, local contribution and sustainability — and quantified the value of each facility on a scale of 0 to 100 using private and public data.

It was also designed to produce recommendations that reflect both personal preference and social value, based on inputs such as the user's age group, gender, preferred time of day, preferred day of the week and spending style. The result was implemented as a FastAPI backend and a React-based frontend dashboard, with features including recommendation results, visualization of facility values and map-based exploration.

Through the project the POPOI team handled the full span of data-driven service planning and development, from data collection and preprocessing to indicator design, recommendation model development and web service implementation. It is notable in particular for turning the social value of cultural facilities — something that has been difficult to measure — into concrete data indicators and connecting them to a working service.

Jinseob Noh, CEO of StellarCube, who also serves as an adjunct professor in Hansung University's Department of Applied AI, said: "This project is a meaningful case of industry–academia collaboration in which students defined a local problem based on real data and implemented a service using AI and data technology. StellarCube will continue to support the training of practically skilled AI and data specialists and the development of services that address local problems through cooperation with universities."