"Internet+" Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition Inspires Millions of College Students to Strive for A Better Future

USA - English

• USA - español
• USA - Deutsch
• USA - Français

CHONGQING, China, April 7, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Since its inauguration in 2015, China International College Students' "Internet+" Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition (the "Competition") has inspired 39.83 million university students to build a better future with high-quality projects in artificial intelligence (AI), big data, and cloud computing, according to the competition organizer Chongqing University.

The Championship of the 8^th Competition will kick off on April 9 in Chongqing City, Southwest China. This year's competition, with "Dare to Differ, Dare to Win" as the theme, covers areas of Internet, manufacturing, information technology services, and modern agriculture.

Chinese President Xi Jinping pointed out at the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China that it is necessary to deeply implement the strategy for invigorating China through science, education, and talents, and the innovation-driven development strategy, to open up new tracks in new areas of development, and to steadily foster new momentum and advantages in development.

At the new historical starting point, it's very critical to adhere to the integration of education development, science, technology innovation and talent training to form a beneficial cycle, and the integration of original innovation to achieve effective outcome.

"Dare to Think, Dare to Create" Spirit Makes Aerospace Cutting-edge Technology a Reality

The cross-rotor compound-thrust tail rotor unmanned helicopter project of the 5th competition championship has blossomed and borne fruit. In the fight against mountain fire, the unmanned aerial vehicle developed by it participated in the fire-fighting mission in Chongqing last year.

Li Jingyang, the project leader who graduated from the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics of Tsinghua University, is a typical entrepreneur who grew up from the Competition. The project actively explores cutting-edge technologies in the aerospace field.

In August 2022, the project took the initiative in the fight against wildfires in Chongqing, and participated in the rescue, which reflects "dare to think and create" spirit, as well as "dare to take responsibility" of contemporary youth.

Since its establishment of the company in October 2015, the team has developed composite propulsion helicopter technology, and has now grown into a national high-tech enterprise, with more than 50 invention patents, and 6 rounds of financing of 350 million yuan (about 50 million US dollars). An unmanned helicopter with crossed twin-rotor compound thrust and tail rotor has been built and helped create nearly 1,000 jobs.

The project has now completed the finalization and industrialization of models with a take-off weight of 60kg, 120kg, and 550kg, and has realized the batch installation of unmanned helicopters in the fire rescue corps for the first time in China, which can be widely used in forest firefighting, high-rise firefighting, water rescue and other fields.

Innovation Opens a New Era of Adaptive Robots

How to "convert" functions of more sophisticated human behaviors into robot algorithm? That's a vital question faced by Flexiv, a 6-year-old robotics company founded by graduates from Stanford University. The company launched Rizon, the world's first adaptive robot that fuses high-performance force control, computer vision, and AI technology.

Flexiv stood out at the 7^th Competition in 2021 and received the highest-ever score on the international track since the track was established. Such a team with already advanced technology also garnered valuable experience from the Competition.

"We put more thoughts into our business model through conducting roadshows at higher level," said Hu Xiaoping, the Deputy General Manager of Flexiv, adding that his team had been readjusting their project goals based on the feedback from experts and committee members, and learning new lessons to constantly improve the project, so as to be more prepared for the actual launch.

Dr. Wang Jinfan from Stanford University, who was also the Lead Project Manager of Flexiv Robotics, found the competition a wonderful channel for universities to truly understand the business ideas of their students, and to set good examples for college students on entrepreneurship.

International Cooperation Boosts Low-Carbon Bio-Intelligent Manufacturing Project

The Mo-TrolBioLab Project is a typical case of practicing green and low-carbon biological intelligence. Helen M Park, the co-founder of this international cooperation project, is from Ghent University in Belgium. Mo-TrolBioLab taps and releases the potential of synthetic biology to realize the core vision of "smart, effective, green and low-carbon future biomanufacturing industry".

Based on the combination of metabolic network model construction, machine learning, and multi-omics analysis in synthetic biology technology-intensive areas, the project continuously provides solutions to long research and development cycle, poor controllability, and difficult process control of traditional cell metabolism engineering from the source, and other bottleneck problems, to establish an intelligent biomanufacturing platform for cell factory design and fermentation production process regulation based on cell metabolism characteristics and online parameter feedback.

High-quality innovation and entrepreneurship talents have become the basic elements in the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem, and innovation and entrepreneurship education has become an inevitable requirement for deepening education and teaching reform and improving the quality of education in an all-round way.

Outstanding young teams have continuously made progress and honed themselves in the past eight competitions. A large number of young talents of vision, responsibility, aspiration, and capability have stood out. They apply what they have learned, and continue to make achievements in innovation and entrepreneurship.