On March 22, Chinese tech giant Baidu and Tianjin University (TJU) signed a cooperation agreement to boost Emerging Engineering Education (3E) and explore talent cultivation models.

According to the agreement, based on practical demand and future development, the two sides will build pilot classes, joint labs, AI training and 3E project innovation bases to explore 3E together. Both Baidu and TJU highly value this agreement which lays a solid foundation for their future cooperation.

The Baidu 3E Pilot Class at TJU

Baidu and TJU will deepen their cooperation and for the first time build a Baidu 3E Pilot Class at TJU. In the Pilot Class, people will focus on world technological trends, including AI, big data and machine learning, and explore models of teaching talented interdisciplinary 3E students focusing on innovation and practice.

Li Jiajun, TJU Party Secretary, said that this university-enterprise cooperation is designed to train future-oriented graduates. The cooperation establishes platforms and collaborative projects, which will promote the innovative cultivation of talent models as well as the docking between industry and the academic community. It is believed it will help TJU students develop quickly with both research and practical abilities.

Lee Liu, Senior Vice President of Baidu and a TJU alumnus, said that cooperation between Baidu and TJU will achieve complementary advantages. On the one hand, TJU has played a leading role in constructing 3E, whose students shoulder the responsibility of boosting education to invigorate the country. On the other hand, Baidu is a tech giant who leads the development of AI and has, for a long time, accumulated much experience in the fields of algorithm development and data processing, as well as in unmanned vehicle, smart city and smart home technology in the recent years. Together with the joint labs and an Innovation Workshop, Baidu and TJU will develop in-depth cooperation for the construction of fundamental research platforms and disciplines, which will help TJU develop 3E and expand TJU’s influence.

Humans are the key to AI development

Apart from the Pilot Class, the two sides will also deliver lectures on deep learning and build an Innovation Workshop that lays emphasis on the development of mobile internet technology, AI, autonomous driving and search optimization, etc. Since these fields are strong on practical attributes, TJU graduates will be interdisciplinary experts with both theoretical knowledge and practical experience.

University-Enterprise Cooperation — A New Road to the Future of Technological Innovation

As new technologies, represented by artificial intelligence, quantum information, and block chain, are being upgraded rapidly, the cooperation between universities and enterprises is becoming increasingly important. By cooperating with Baidu, TJU aims to explore a new path and establish new norms for 3E. They will integrate the industrial trend, the practical demand of enterprises and the frontiers of academic research and development, so as to boost AI-related disciplines and build a nationwide AI education demonstration archetype.

Scientific and technological innovation is key to the rise of a country, and the development of higher education will surely meet the needs of China’s development. Since February 2017, China’s Ministry of Education has actively promoted 3E, aiming to lead global engineering education and proactively respond to the new scientific and technological revolution and industrial reform. TJU plays a leading role in 3E reform, and its 9 projects have been listed in the first batch of new engineering research and practice projects by the Ministry of Education in 2018, which outnumbered all other universities in China.