In March 2019, the 23rd Contest of the Most Admired PKU Teachers organized by the Student Union of Peking University was launched. The results were announced recently. Professor Xuanzhe Liu was selected.
The contest of Most Admired PKU Teachers began from 1996 and is held once a year. This event acts as a bridge between teachers and students, and it is highly influential in Peking University. It provides an opportunity for students to participate in school management directly and promotes the development of campus culture. In addition, it serves as a platform to propagate virtues of teachers and express gratitude and love for teachers.
On the evening of April 8, Professor Liu was invited to give a public lecture entitled, “The Age of Artificial Intelligence: Status and Thinking”. He started the lecture with the recent advances in computer science and artificial intelligence. He introduced the history, basic concepts, principles and applications of AI together with rich examples. Furthermore, He discussed about the changes made by artificial intelligence on the society, economy, ethics, law, life and other aspects.
Professor Liu explained profound theories in simple words. He made it fun and easy for students to understand basic mathematics and computer science knowledge behind artificial intelligence. He used interesting examples like AlphaGo, smart assistant, self-driving cars, machine translation and face-swapping apps to show the wide applications of artificial intelligence in daily life. He said, “To some degree, today’s AI (Artificial Intelligence) is more like IA (Intelligent Augment) rather than human-like intelligence. It is changing the society by making many jobs more intelligent and creating new application areas, and even new economic patterns. The power of technology would bring more beauty and probabilities to the world.” Professor Liu concluded the lecture with a famous sentence, “This is the best of times, this is the worst of times, this is the age of wisdom, this is the age of foolishness.”, from A Tale of Two Cities. He wished all students could keep their mind in the age of artificial intelligence. This lecture was highly praised by all listeners for its interesting content, novel viewpoints, detailed explanation and pleasant atmosphere.
Professor Xuanzhe Liu obtained Bachelor degree and PhD degree from Peking University and joined the Software Engineering Institute, Peking University since 2011. His research interests are focused on novel software technology for big data and Internet. He has published more than 80 papers in top-tier journals and conferences of computer science, and several papers were selected as best/spotlight paper. He has won CCF-IEEE CS Young Scientists Award, the Yangtze River Scholar Award for Young Scholars, the First Prize of National Technical Invention Award and the special prize for technological invention by the Chinese Institute of Electronics, the CCF’s Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award and the National Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Nomination Award. He has taught many courses including Introduction to Computing (A) and Foundations of Computer Application, and the number of student enrollment of these courses exceeds 2000. He is one of the main contributors of the course Software Engineering, which is selected as the National Excellent Course. He won the Excellent Teaching Award of Peking University in 2018, and was awarded as the Outstanding Head Teacher for two times. The PhD students supervised by him have received many honors such as the Microsoft Fellowship, the IBM PhD Fellowship and Five-Four Medals for Students of Peking University.
Public lecture is one of the series of events of Most Admired PKU Teachers. This award is not only a recognition of his devotion to teaching and research, but also an acknowledgement of our institute’s efforts to strengthen skills of teaching staff, especially for young staff.
