On the second anniversary of ‘4.13 major policy address’ delivered by General Secretary Xi Jinping, the characteristic disciplines’ development of the School of Information & Intelligence Engineering (SIIE) of USY also closely revolves around the demand for Hainan FTP construction. It has made new breakthroughs in discipline construction, personnel training and synergy platform building, and has made concrete efforts to speed up the construction of Hainan FTP with practical actions.
AI Lab
The discipline construction is closely related to the industry demand and explores the new talent training mode. Over the past two years, the SIIE has newly increased two undergraduate majors, namely Data Science & Big Data and Intelligent Science & Technology to meet the demand of USY’s discipline layout of ‘Artificial Intelligence + Big Data’ as well as the needs of Hainan’s characteristic industries, such as ocean, agriculture, tourism, and medical treatment. It has become the construction unit of master's degree program of Electronic Information Engineering in Hainan. At the same time, the SIIE has designed and established a Supercomputing Center with a peak calculated value of 10 billion times, ranking among the top five universities in China in terms of its comprehensive performance. Two academician workstations, i.e. Academician Chen Guoliang Workstation and Academician Rong Chunming Workstation, have settled in consecutively and set up research and teaching teams with computer vision, high-performance computing, network security and VR, etc., and have been approved six scientific research projects at both provincial and ministerial level, including Ministry of Science and Technology of the PRC.
Supercomputing Center
In terms of student cultivation, the SIIE actively explored innovative talent training mode in response to the call of Education Department of Hainan Province. In 2019, USY established the first ‘Innovation Experiment Class’, and successively set up student project development studios such as ‘Muma Nanshan’ and ‘Tianya Geek Club’, invested to build professional training platforms such as AI laboratory, actively encouraged students to innovate and practice, and guided students to participate in national and provincial discipline competitions. In the past two years, the student entrepreneurship team has won 21 national awards such as the first prize of the national green computing competition for university students, more than 100 provincial awards, and more than 20 innovation and entrepreneurship projects.
AI Training Room
“Every new policy guidance and industrial distribution will generate the demand for talents, especially high-end talents, in various industries. Hainan FTP construction is bound to usher in a new wave of talent demand, especially in the new industries such as big Data, Fintech, medical health and new energy vehicles. The high-end and professional requirements of these industries for talents highlight the foresight of the characteristic disciplines of ‘Artificial Intelligence + Big Data’ we have laid out in advance. In the future, we need to innovate thinking, keep an open mind, actively cooperate with the government, and deeply integrate with the industry. On the basis of the existing undergraduate talent cultivation level, we must strive to achieve the high-end talent training for master’s students of Engineering, so that the talents we cultivate locally can better contribute to the construction of Hainan FTP”, said Professor Yang Boxiong, deputy dean of the SIIE.
National Academic Conferences with Coordinated Development
The SIIE has always been adhering to the spirit of collaborative development of ‘Government, Industry, Education, Research and Application’, and actively cooperated with the governments, enterprises and public institutions at all levels in Hainan Province and Sanya City to carry out extensive information construction and technology application activities. Over the past two years, it has successively hosted national conferences such as the National Summit Forum on Computer Basic Education, the Academic Forum on Digital Industry and Discipline Development with the theme of ‘Embracing 5G·Holding Hands with AI’, and introduced famous teachers and experts to promote the discipline development. At the same time, the SIIE also made full use of the advantages of supercomputing resources, built a platform to attract talents, and jointly applied for various scientific research projects with the Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering under Chinese Academy of Sciences (IDSSE, CAS), the Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (RADI, CAS), and South Breeding Base, etc. It has applied for and was approved to establish Hainan software genetic engineering research center, becoming the first software gene and malicious code research center in China.
Embracing 5G·Holding Hands with AI
‘Information reaches the universe and wisdom creates the future.’ Facing the unprecedented opportunity of the construction of Hainan FTP, the SIIE of USY will focus on the development of AI, big data, block-chain and other directions, make full use of the high-performance computing and storage resources of Supercomputing Center, and make a comprehensive layout and in-depth application in the fields of Fintech, health tourism, tropical agriculture, medical treatment, ocean, remote sensing and so on, to fully promote the comprehensive and sustainable development of local economy and society.
(Photos from: School of Information & Intelligence Engineering, USY)
(Edited by: Xu Ying Translated by: Liu Peiyun Proofread by: Xue Yuhang)