Baidu CEO Mr. Robin Li’s Tsinghua Lecture and “Tsinghua-Baidu Scholarship” Awarding Ceremony took place at Tsinghua Xuetang on the afternoon of Sept. 13, 2012. The event was chaired by IIIS Assistant Professor Jia Xu.
Robin Li is giving a talk to IIIS Students
Baidu CEO Mr. Robin Li under the invitation of Academician Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, IIIS Dean and Chair Professor of “Tsinghua Xuetang Special Pilot CS Class” (Yao Class) shared with Yao students a talk entitled Nine Real Hard Problems We’d Like You to Solve. It drew an audience that filled the Tsinghua Xuetang lecture room and had people standing in the aisles.
In his more-than-one-hour talk, Mr. Li put forward “Nine Real Hard Problems” for the students to solve, including OCR text recognition, voice recognition, content-based image retrieval, anti-trash social products, computing-based open data platform, open application platform, the open release platform, the personalized home page, as well as social product monetization. These also were the problems he proposed while attending the 18th ACM SIGKDD a month ago.
The lecture is well-attended
“Thanks to industry transformation, the era we are in is filled with new opportunities,” Mr. Robin Li mentioned that the rapid expanding of Baidu users would bring about new technical challenges that could cover every aspect of computer science, rather than search technology itself. These challenges had developed into the typical problems in the field of computer science and Internet.
Prof. Yao and Mr. Li are answering students’ questions.
“You are the most promising young men to solve these problems.” Mr. Li had high expectations of Yao Class students. “I hope you can be exposed to these difficulties as early as possible, so that you can use your intelligence earlier, to solve not only the problems that have puzzled us for decades, but also the newly arising ones. Eventually, you will become a successful man with innovative thinking.”
After the talk, Mr. Li and Prof. Yao answered students’ questions enthusiastically, which brought about another climax of the whole event. A Yao Class student even called it “Turing-Award-Level Answer.”
Group Photo: Prof. Yao, Mr. Li and all the “Tsinghua-Baidu Scholarship” winners
Before the lecture, 20 students from IIIS were awarded the “Tsinghua-Baidu Scholarship” by Prof. Yao and Mr. Li. Zichao Qi and Huiwen Chang gave remarks afterwards, on behalf of the scholarship winners and joint projects participants respectively. Tsinghua-Baidu Top Innovative Talent Program had been inaugurated on December 16, 2011, which aims to nurture top-notch innovative talents that are capable of solving the most valuable problems. Up until now, the program has achieved fruitful results.
Zichao Qi and Huiwen Chang are giving remarks.
