Focus Interview: Cultivating a New and Innovative Campus for Youth | Innovation | Youth
CCTV News: Youth is the future of our country, the hope of our nation, and the future of innovation.Universities are gathering places for young scientific and technological talents, as well as places where students dream of setting sail. Classmates have youthful vitality and endless creative ideas, but lack experience and resources. How to enhance the innovation ability of young students and help them turn their ideas into reality? In recent years, some universities have put a lot of effort into helping students with scientific research innovation and achievement transformation.
The students of the "Light and Shadow Transfer" project team at Nanjing University of Technology used their self-developed ultra-high definition infrared thermal imager to take photos of the Bund in the darkness. Returning to the laboratory, the project team imported the photos taken with a thermal imager into the computer, and the buildings on the Bund in Shanghai were clearly visible in the darkness.
In the dark, he still has a keen eye and a keen insight. This is the first international ultra-high definition infrared thermal imager based on computational imaging principles. It was developed by a team led by Wang Bowen, a doctoral student majoring in Optical Engineering at Nanjing University of Technology in 2019.
Infrared thermal imager is an instrument that uses infrared thermal imaging technology to observe objects. It can clearly see objects that we cannot see or cannot see clearly with the naked eye in the dark. It is widely used in fields such as precise temperature measurement, intelligent driving, and night vision detection. However, previous infrared thermal imagers typically had a resolution of only one million pixels, while the product developed by Wang Bowen's team had a resolution of over 100 million pixels. This means that the detection range of the detector has expanded from one or two kilometers to over ten kilometers, nearly tenfold.
Previously, the technological bottleneck of infrared thermal imagers with a resolution of millions of pixels had existed globally for 20 years. The research team that achieved this breakthrough was 13 master's and doctoral students from different majors at Nanjing University of Technology. They have gone through 5 years of technological breakthroughs, constantly breaking through technological bottlenecks, and ultimately creating a world record of "billion pixels" in infrared imaging.
How did such a young team break through this cutting-edge technological challenge that has been troubling the industry for a long time and achieve such impressive results? A key factor behind this is that Nanjing University of Technology provides these young people with an environment and various guarantees for scientific research and innovation.
The field of computational optics studied by Wang Bowen's team belongs to a cutting-edge interdisciplinary field, and studying a single major is far from enough. How to break through the boundaries of traditional disciplines and build an innovative research platform that integrates multiple disciplines is crucial for cultivating such research talents and cultivating innovative achievements. To this end, in 2020, Nanjing University of Technology established the Optical Frontier Cross disciplinary Research Center, which integrates multiple disciplines such as optical engineering, biomedical and engineering, materials science and engineering, and promotes basic and applied research in the field of optical frontiers.
Professor Zuo Chao from the School of Electronic Engineering and Optoelectronic Technology at Nanjing University of Science and Technology said, "Gathering the strength of the whole school to concentrate all teams involved in optics in a single cross cutting research center is to gather optics together to form a joint force, which can generate true innovation and breakthroughs."
While conducting scientific research, it is also important to focus on transforming research results into practical products, in order to truly leverage the benefits of research results and effectively promote and encourage further innovation among researchers. In this regard, Nanjing University of Technology has also been exploring and has specifically established a series of research achievement incubation platforms.
The Wang Bowen team has registered a company on the school's scientific research incubation platform. With the help of the school, they can use various resources on the platform to transform their scientific research achievements into market-oriented products and earn profits from them.
Relying on such a scientific research innovation system and educational philosophy, Nanjing University of Technology has actively explored and cultivated a group of young scientific research talents like Wang Bowen in scientific research education in recent years.
Fu Mengyin, president of Nanjing University of Science and Technology and academician of the CAE Member: "In our development process, we always adhere to the need of the country is our best direction, and this idea runs through the process of educating people. We always adhere to the goal of 'engineering elites and social elites' talent training, which is also aimed at cultivating talents for the country's major strategic needs, and improving our ability to find and solve problems, which we have always adhered to."
At present, many universities have achieved good results in innovation research and achievement transformation, not only for doctoral and master's students, but also for many young undergraduate students who are also ambitious and perform well. Zhejiang University students have developed a smartphone app called "Weier". The R&D team consists of more than ten undergraduate students born in the 2000s from different majors at Zhejiang University, with an average age of only 21 years old.
What mobile app is "Suier"? Each round and cute cartoon character in this app corresponds to a real user in the real world. Simply put, this app creates a twin "self" for users in the virtual world through digital algorithms. This digital version of "self" carries various real data information of users.
Wang Zhenyang, a 2019 undergraduate student from the School of Computer Science and Technology at Zhejiang University, said, "We use a round image to carry some of the users' internal characteristics. As long as the users authorize us with information, we can collect tags from different aspects of the users, including sleep, exercise, health, and app usage, and map the user image to the virtual world."
The virtual cartoon image is not mechanical and static, but will update data synchronously with the daily activities of mobile phone users. Various changes in mobile phone users' lifestyle habits, sleep patterns, etc. will receive timely feedback on this virtual image.
The idea of creating a virtual digital image for oneself to serve the real self and make oneself better began in early 2021. At that time, Wang Zhenyang, who was still in his sophomore year, and several classmates submitted a project proposal to the school after having this preliminary idea. They quickly received strong support from the school and formed a project team.
These undergraduate students born in the 2000s are still in the stage of learning knowledge and laying a foundation, making it not easy for them to undertake such research and innovation projects. But Zhejiang University did not reject this project application because their knowledge accumulation was relatively weak. On the contrary, the school also provides comprehensive support for students like Wang Zhenyang who are willing to do scientific research and innovation.
Professor Zhang Kejun from the School of Computer Science and Technology at Zhejiang University said, "This is a project that goes from classroom creativity to extracurricular practice, and then to entrepreneurship implementation. The most important thing in protecting enthusiasm or creativity is to make students feel involved. No matter what kind of thinking or creativity they propose, don't rush to reject it. For students, your rejection can be very fatal feedback, which may stop their thinking and also undermine their confidence. The confidence in innovation is very important for freshmen and sophomores."
The school has also established a specialized innovation and entrepreneurship college, integrating teaching resources both inside and outside the school, and creating a comprehensive curriculum system. Students interested in this can choose to take relevant courses.
Xu Guobin, Director of the Student Affairs Department of the Party Committee of Zhejiang University and Dean of the School of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, said, "We have offered over 100 innovation and entrepreneurship education courses to all undergraduate students in the university. From stimulating innovation awareness, to training skills, to optimizing projects, and then to financing and incubation sites, we have a full chain model."
The school has carefully planned the teaching system and curriculum, and has also hired more than 150 well-known domestic and foreign entrepreneurs as course practice mentors to provide students with hands-on knowledge and practical opportunities.
Zhang Sigang, an alumnus of Zhejiang University and Chairman of Zhejiang University Network's New Science and Technology Innovation, is an off campus mentor for the "Weier" project. Every month, he comes to the school to have face-to-face communication with his classmates and answer various questions during the entrepreneurial process.
From registering a company to writing a business plan, and then engaging with investors, experienced off campus mentors provide guidance to students, filling the gaps in their lack of experience and resources, and enabling them to grow rapidly. In addition to providing courses and mentors, Zhejiang University also provides venues, equipment, and funding to fully support students in scientific research, innovation, and entrepreneurship. After continuous efforts, Zhejiang University's scientific research and innovation education has also achieved fruitful results, incubating more than 100 entrepreneurial enterprises with a total market value exceeding 100 billion yuan, including 4 listed companies and 12 quasi unicorn enterprises.
The innovative education model encouraged by Zhejiang University is a microcosm of China's universities exploring the cultivation of innovative talents. Our country's modernization construction and high-quality development cannot do without talents, among which cultivating a group of young scientific and innovative talents is particularly crucial.
Wu Shixing, Deputy Director of the Higher Education Department of the Ministry of Education, said, "Cultivate students' innovative spirit, awareness of discovering and solving problems, form entrepreneurial ability or entrepreneurial consciousness, and transform professional knowledge into abilities through education. The 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China proposed the strategy of innovation driven development, and through education and teaching reform, enable students to master knowledge and abilities. In the field of science and technology, the combination of scientific research transformation and student abilities is well combined to cultivate a large number of talents."
The outstanding young technological talents in the program cannot be separated from the strong support of their respective universities. These schools have updated their educational philosophy, focusing on the cultivation of scientific and innovative talents. They not only incorporate the cultivation of innovative abilities in curriculum design, but also establish incubation mechanisms on campus to support students in transforming creativity into projects and technology into products. This has created a good atmosphere for scientific and technological innovation on campus, and also inspired more young students to run hard on the innovation track. To cultivate a large-scale team of young scientific and technological talents, we need more university campuses full of technological innovation vitality.
