CCNU & Huawei: Cultivating a New Ecosystem for Emerging Engineering Education

In November 2017, Central China Normal University (CCNU) and Huawei established the Innovation Talent Center of the Information and Network Technology Academy, later known as the Huawei ICT Academy Innovation Talent Center. In September 2020, they deepened this collaboration by establishing the Intelligent Base, a University-Industry Collaborative Education Program championed by China's Ministry of Education (MOE) and Huawei.

Over the past seven years, CCNU's School of Computer Science has incorporated a number of Huawei resources into its curriculum through the Huawei ICT Academy. This includes courses on the company's cutting-edge technologies and guidance from their expert tutors. With these resources, CCNU has pioneered a 3-in-1 approach to industry-education collaboration that encompasses innovations in courses, practice, and competitions.

Now, these years of hard work are beginning to pay dividends as CCNU and Huawei have become pathfinders in China's Emerging Engineering Education (3E) exploration.

Building together: A curriculum platform for Emerging Engineering Education

One of the key steps CCNU and Huawei have taken over the past few years is exploring ways to jointly innovate in curriculum development, classroom teaching, and practicum. The Huawei ICT Academy and the Intelligent Base program have both played an important role here.

CCNU's School of Computer Science first annually selects a cohort of 45 high-potential undergraduates, which is named the Huawei Course Team and receives specialized training. The first cohort was named in 2020. Each Huawei Course Team is assigned a class coordinator, a deputy class coordinator, and a professional mentor – all of which are seasoned teachers from CCNU, and engineers or managers from Huawei. The cohort is also assigned a team of mentors, with each mentor providing guidance to two or three students as they study, participate in trainings and subject-specific competition, and pursue other innovation and entrepreneurship opportunities.

The second joint innovation CCNU and Huawei have achieved is the development of 21 courses (see Figure 1), including Artificial Intelligence and Cloud Computing. These courses incorporate cutting-edge topics into the existing curriculum system, and cover areas like deep learning, natural language processing, and computer vision. Some of the courses (such as those on databases and cloud computing) also focus specifically on how to use Huawei's technologies like openGauss databases, Kunpeng processors, Ascend computing, and Huawei Cloud services.

These reforms to CCNU's course catalog have updated its teaching resources including synopses, courseware, and experiment guidance, and ensured its teaching delivers both theoretical and practical knowledge while staying up to date with the latest tech advancements.

20 teachers from the School of Computer Science were selected to design these courses based on their practical capabilities, research achievements, and teaching skills. This benefited not only the cohorts, but the school's teaching team.

Huawei's AI experts are also regularly brought in to give exhaustive lectures on theory and lead hands-on practicum where students explore Huawei's devices and the latest AI technologies. Students' professional practical capabilities have already greatly improved thanks to these practice projects. Some examples of the projects they've completed include implementing edge-cloud collaboration via the Atlas 200 DK developer board and Huawei Cloud, developing object detection algorithms based on MindSpore, and developing object detection applications based on Huawei's Compute Architecture for Neural Networks (CANN), the basic AI software of Ascend.

Another successful program we've run is the Golden Course program under the Intelligent Base initiative. This program saw us developing two well-funded, experiment-based courses: Database Principles and Principles of Computer Composition. In 2023, CCNU's School of Computer Science Associate Professor Ge Fei also had their book Basic Practices in HarmonyOS IoT Development published by the Tsinghua University Press.

One more project worth mentioning is the Ministry of Education (MOE) Virtual Teaching and Research Office that we co-established with Huawei as part of the MOE's broader University-Industry Collaborative Education Program. This office is tasked with developing courses on databases and has already undertaken 20 sub-projects. 5 of its teachers have been named Huawei advocates.

Our students have been able to hone their innovation and practical capabilities thanks to Huawei's technical courses. Some of our undergraduates have since been accepted – sometimes even being exempted from standard qualification testing – by China's top postgraduate programs like those at Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University, and Wuhan University. Our other graduates have been directly recruited by top enterprises.

Zhao Xiaofan, for example, was a member of CCNU's first Huawei Course Team. In 2020, while still a student, Zhao worked on an AI-assisted cervical cancer diagnosis system. The system represented a breakthrough in AI-assisted image interpretation and is the first of its kind to realize automatic report generation for cervical biopsy detection systems. Zhao's team took this project to the 18th Challenge Cup National College Student Extracurricular Academic and Technological Works Competition, where they won the Grand Prize. Zhao has since been selected for postgraduate and doctoral study at Zhejiang University, where she will continue to research computer systems.

Her year-mate, Guo Junyan, was their team's class representative in 2020. Guo has also brought in many honors at heavyweight competitions like the Internet+ Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition, where he was recognized for his excellent research and leadership capabilities. During his time as an undergraduate, he received a government sponsorship to study at the University of Victoria. Since graduating, he has gone on to further study at the University of London.

CCNU has received much acclaim both for the model it has created for university-enterprise collaboration and for the outstanding quality of its graduates. CCNU has been named an Excellent Huawei ICT Academy Innovation Talent Center for two consecutive years, in 2019 and 2020. In 2022, CCNU won the Award of Collaboration for Excellent Huawei ICT Academy Innovation Talent Center. In 2024, Huawei also presented CCNU with the Global Talent Alliance Partner Award.

Training together: The extracurricular practice driving talent cultivation

Beyond developing classroom-centric courses, CCNU and Huawei have gradually expanded their collaboration to extracurricular training programs. We have worked together to host multiple MindSpore Innovation Training Camps and Huawei Ascend AI Innovation Training Camps (see Figure 2 and Figure 3). The results have been remarkable.

The innovation training camps are intended to help students from key universities in Central China improve their capabilities in AI, innovation, and entrepreneurship by providing lessons in theory, hands-on practice, and project presentation. More than 200 students have participated in the camps and benefited immensely.

Huawei's technical experts, including MindSpore advocates, ecosystem experts, and senior lecturers, help run these camps, providing lectures on subject-specific technologies and interacting directly with trainees. Their lectures cover AI fundamentals, the MindSpore AI development framework, and Huawei's Ascend AI full-stack solutions. Students are also given personal access to Huawei Cloud ModelArts AI development platform and the MindNLP suite during these camps, creating ideal opportunities for practice.

The training camps encourage trainees to take on group projects related to both AI innovation and their individual professional backgrounds and interests. At the end of the camp, trainees present their projects in front of a defense panel. Throughout this process, they receive guidance and feedback from experts, which combined with classroom teaching, helps deepen their understanding of new theories and technologies. This method has had a clear positive impact on students in emerging engineering subjects.

The trainees themselves come from a range of different backgrounds. Most are from leading universities in Central China, but their foundational knowledge can vary, meaning each of them takes away unique insights from the camp:

Some trainees have little previous exposure to large language models (LLMs). They start by learning basic attention mechanisms and eventually move on to using MindSpore to develop multimodal model prototypes capable of processing images and texts.

Some trainees have prior experience with LLMs but none with MindSpore. They are placed under the guidance of technical experts who teach them how to migrate the experience they accumulated in PyTorch to MindSpore. They start with the MindSpore framework before going on to conduct in-depth research and testing on the ChatGLM foundation model. Some have even discovered and verified potential security issues within this model.

Some trainees have previously been active in the MindSpore community during their undergraduate study. They contribute to the implementation versions of multiple typical deep learning algorithms in MindSpore, and have been directly given Huawei internships.

Although these trainees are all starting at different places, the chance to meet and interact with their peers during the training camps while tackling the technical side of the MindSpore all-scenario converged AI framework and the MindSpore foundation model platform has benefitted them all. Through practice, they have laid solid groundwork for future research and innovation in the fields of AI and foundation models.

Growing together: Professional competitions that tackle real-world problems

CCNU views professional competitions as both an important means to improve students' innovation capabilities and an effective method to validate the quality of the talent we cultivate. During the 2023–2024 Huawei ICT Competition, our students competed with top talent from around the world and set themselves apart with their professionalism and ability to tackle real-world problems (see Figure 4). A CCNU team won the Grand Prize at the Global Final of Huawei ICT Competition's Innovation Competition.

The team was led by instructor Peng Xi, who helped Wang Rong, Peng Ruofei, and Wang Yiting develop a smart agricultural inspection robot with many intelligent functions, such as intelligent inspection and disease identification. Their project won the Grand Prize of the Innovation Competition at the Huawei ICT Competition Global Final. The project used an Atlas 200I DK A2 control board – one of Huawei's proprietary designs. Based on Atlas 200I DK A2, they used the DevEco Studio and ArkTS UI development framework along with the Gold-YOLO algorithm for crop disease identification. On top of this, they developed a HarmonyOS app for users.

A second CCNU team consisting of Wang Qingyan and Tan Tingting focused on applying engineering to healthcare. With the coaching by their instructor Yao Huaxiong, they worked on an intelligent medical consultation system based on MindSpore. Their project won the Grand Prize in the National Final of the Innovation Competition. This project uses multiple Huawei technologies, including MindSpore, Ascend, ModelArts, and HarmonyOS, along with a fine-tuned LLM, the LangChain framework, and knowledge bases, to design three application entities: a smart medicine cabinet, a HarmonyOS app, and a drug delivery robot. This project explores possibilities in community health work, such as AI-powered general consultations, over-the-counter treatment services, and first-aid Q&A.

These professional competitions help students gain a deeper understanding of the knowledge they acquire in the classroom and hone their research and innovation capabilities. Importantly, they also give the students a platform to shine and show the world their outstanding qualities. In September 2024, Wang Rong, Peng Ruofei, and Wang Yiting were all admitted to the prestigious postgraduate programs at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhejiang University, and Beijing Normal University, respectively. Wang Qingyan and Tan Tingting went on to pursue master's degrees at Northwestern Polytechnical University and Xiamen University, respectively. Li Jingzhe, enrolled to CCNU in 2020, also showcased an outstanding AI project when he participated in the 2021–2022 Huawei ICT Competition, where he won the First Prize in the National Final, Third Prize in the Global Final, and a TECH4ALL honor. He also went on to join the renowned Fudan University for further study.

CCNU and Huawei will continue to deepen our collaboration. By leveraging each of our unique advantages, this partnership will create a strong foundation for shared success. Together, we are better positioned to foster a flourishing ICT talent ecosystem, and nurture innovative, self-reliant, interdisciplinary computer professionals who are well-versed in multiple domains. Together, we can build a stronger talent pipeline to drive progress with innovation.