The ceremony of the Research and Practice Program of New Engineering Disciplines and Beihang-Tencent Cooperation was held on the morning of April 17th, with Prof. Wang Zulin from the Office of Student Affairs being the host. Huang Haijun, Vice President of Beihang University, and Wang Juhong, Vice President of Tencent, signed an industry-academia cooperation memorandum on behalf of the two sides at the ceremony.
Prof. Huang welcomed the attendees and introduced Beihang University briefly from the aspects of history and developments, advantages and construction of disciplines, talent cultivation, scientific and technological innovations, etc. He believed that the traditional engineering education should be geared towards the industrial needs, and the transfer and commercialization of scientific and technological achievements should be promoted. He was very optimistic about the cooperation between Beihang and Tencent, the academia and the industry.
Ms. Wang said Tencent had developed a system to collaborate with universities in cultivating talents, which include research talents in cutting-edge fields like artificial intelligence (AI), professional talents in cloud computing and cybersecurity, interdisciplinary talents in Internet Plus fields and so on. According to her, Tencent expected that, through Beihang-Tencent educational cooperation, a platform would be built to improve teachers’ capabilities, develop new engineering disciplines. explore patterns to cultivate talents, and reform traditional educational models by information-based methods.
Then Prof. Huang and Ms. Wang signed an industry-academia cooperation memorandum, which aims to integrate the advantageous resources possessed by the two sides in education and industry. Based on resource sharing and win-win cooperation, Beihang and Tencent will join hands in talent cultivation, informationalization of education, scientific research and so on, following the need-oriented and task-driven principle. Their collaboration embodies the combined efforts to promote the process of digitalization and the integration of academia and industry, which will be powered by the cloud service, big data and AI of Tencent. They also plan to deepen their cooperation and cultivate the brightest minds for China’s development in a new era.
Prof. Gao Xiaopeng, Vice Dean of the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Prof. Cao Qinghua, Vice Dean of Beihang School, and Mr. Liu Kesheng, Executive Dean of Shie College signed the agreement of industry-academia cooperation programs with Mr. Sun Chao, General Operation Manager of Tencent Cloud. Ms. Wang and Prof. Huang also presented certificates of honor to the directors of new engineering programs from the Ministry of Education and Beihang University respectively.
The ceremony ended with a lecture entitled “Tencent Artificial Intelligence”, which was delivered by Mr. Zhang Yanfu, an expert AI architect from Tencent. He introduced the strategic plan of Tencent in the field of AI as well as the essence, development, application, talent need of AI, and provided technical explanations of the cases of face recognition, image recognition and voice technology. As he said, Tencent would apply AI in more fields and situations, significantly contributing to industrial progress and social development.
Reported by Jiang Shan
Edited by Wang Qing
Translated by Li Mingzhu
