Red Star News:
This year's summit includes eight competitions, adding, for example, events related to big data and robots. What were the considerations for doing so? How do we encourage teenagers to participate in these competitions?
You Mengjun:
This a very good question. General Secretary Xi Jinping has repeatedly stressed that to seek innovation is to seek the future. As an important part of the summit, the Innovation Contest has now been a success across two sessions, attracting the participation of a large number of outstanding teams and teenagers from home and abroad. The last session of the contest witnessed the involvement of nearly 10,000 teams and more than 20,000 contestants. The contest is becoming more and more professional and its reputation is growing across the industry.
This year's event will see eight competitions held simultaneously, including digital Party building, digital government, big data, smart healthcare, Kunpeng computing, cybersecurity, integrated circuits, and youth AI robots. Organizing competitions in these fields is mainly to dovetail areas of interest in the development of digital technology and various points of industry focus. For example, this year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, so we added a new competition event titled digital Party building.
You mentioned another two new competition events just now — big data and robots — for which we had the following considerations:
General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out that data is also a factor of production and big data is an important productive force. By holding the big data competition, we aim to focus on the theme of this year's summit, pooling intellectual resources of enterprises, colleges, and universities, and scientific research institutions to accelerate the technological innovation and industrial application of various data. We also seek to explore new models and scenarios for data sharing, opening-up, development, and utilization and develop a group of big data application projects to facilitate industrial transformation, social governance, and public services in a targeted manner.
General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out that the cultivation of scientific and technological personnel should begin with children. The Digital China Summit also attaches great importance to the fostering of innovation among teenagers. During the third session of the summit last year, we held a contest for primary and middle school students. After an extensive selection process, nearly 1,000 students took part in the competition, which highlighted the innovative potential of many young people. This year, we changed the contest for primary and middle school students into a youth-built AI robot competition, whose aim is to "popularize AI education and cultivate scientific and technological personnel for the future." By doing so, we want to highlight the important position of AI in the application of digital technology and guide teenagers to study AI knowledge systematically through interesting and challenging competitions with the goal of cultivating scientific professionals for the future.
In order to encourage youngsters to participate in the AI robot competition, we worked with the Fujian Association of Science and Technology and other institutions to carry out promotional activities at primary and middle schools across the province. It is hoped that the competition will attract a new generation of students to study and take interest in information technology. As far as we know, students are so far very interested in the competition and schools are organizing registration. The competition is expected to stimulate primary and middle school students' interest in digital technology innovation and help cultivate young innovative talents who will make contributions to the development of Digital China. Thank you for the questions.
