President Ding Xiaodong’s Commencement Speech to Graduates of Class 2023: Be a Creator of Your Life, Your Time and Your Future

Dear teachers, parents and students:
A heartfelt welcome to everyone! We gather here to celebrate the commencement of all graduates of Class 2023 and an additional 820 of Class 2022. On behalf of USST, I would like to extend my warmest congratulations to the students who have successfully completed their studies! And also pay my highest respect to all the teachers and parents for your great love and dedications!
Each class of graduates has its own exclusive memory, and yours must be that of the covid-19. In view of the great difficulty the pandemic has posed to you, your courage, fortitude and efforts become all the more remarkable! The past four years has witnessed the rapid development of China, the emergence of a new round of technological and industrial revolution which had restructured the economic and social landscape. A changing situation of the world never seen in the past hundred years has concurred with the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, and we have come to an era when the only unchanged is change. How to cope with all these changes and break new grounds both for the nation and our own life? The answer is nothing but innovation. Innovation is the source of the progress of human civilization and the primary driving force for development. In such a critical moment, I would like to share with you a few ideas and methods about innovation, so as to provide some reference for your future career.
1. What kind of innovation awareness should we establish?
Firstly, the underlying logic of innovation is to have rule-breaking ideas and thinking. We often emphasize too much on whether we have “learned” or not before a task, unaware of the fact that what matters in innovation is not knowledge but courage and the way of thinking. Professor Hua Zezhao majored in "engineering thermophysics" in Tsinghua University, but in USST, he shifted to refrigeration, engaged in the study of "low temperature biomedical technology", which combined "refrigeration and low temperature" with biology. From the establishment of China's first low-temperature bioengineering laboratory, to the development of the gap-filling large low-temperature biological microscope, and the application of low-reservation technology to clinical hospital, Professor Hua has broken through a row of "unpopular" fields in the kingdom of life. In order to broaden the scope of his profession, Professor Hua later combined "freezing" and "food" into "food refrigeration", which had gave rise to a series of new majors in USST such as "biomedical engineering" and "food science and engineering". It is in the "switch" of different fields that Professor Hua has made a breakthrough from 0 to 1 and from 1 to more. As graduates who are facing new subjects, new tasks and new requirements, try to be bold and fearless in your work and learn new things in practice, so that you can break new grounds even in unfamiliar fields.
Secondly, be an observant person and always stay highly sensitive. Innovation is sometimes as easy as pie if only you have that sensitivity, but extremely difficult if you have not. Academician Zhou Liwei, an alumnus of USST, recalled one of his important inventions as a new graduate working in a factory decades ago. He remembed his daily work of making enameled coil, which would cost a worker 15 minutes of manual labor for making a single coil due to the asymmetric shape of the flat single coil. After careful observation, Zhou invented a new way of wraping the coil with his knowledge of the screw principle, which increased the production efficiency by 7.5 times. If we were not highly keen to capture the needs of improving productivity and workers’ labor, it would be impossible for Zhou's invention. Therefore, innovation depends on whether we have a keen eye for discovery.
2. What innovative ways do we have?
There are no fixed methods, but I venture to suggest the following three:
The first is the "demand-driven method". Israel is called the "country of innovation", where people believe "demand is the mother of innovation". Innovation often grows in the blank point of demand. Finding demand and creating demand is a key innovation method. For example, medical suture needles are a necessary tool for surgical skin suture. The price of imported surgical suture needles is more than 100 yuan per piece, while that of similar domestic products is about 10 yuan. However, in domestic clinical practice, most doctors use imported needles, because domestic needles are easy to bend and break. Behind such a needle is the urgent need of the domestic substitution of medical equipments. Driven by such a demand, the engineering team of USST spent only 2 months in proposing a solution, which both solved the problem of low obdurability of domestic needles, and cut the cost down to only half of the imported needle. Currently, an incubation company has been established for the project for technological transformation and clinical application. Surgical suture needle is just a case of many similar stories, because the demand for clinical engineering technology is huge and endless. It is just this demand-driven method that has generated more than 300 projects, and achieved a series of medical-engineering results such as high frequency surgical electric knife, ultrasonic cutting knife, airway cannula, disposable flexible cryoablation needle.
The second is the " dimension-upgrading method". On a piece of paper are two donkeys standing face to face, whatever way, it is impossible to stand in the same direction, because they are in a two-dimensional space; but if you remove a donkey from the surface and turned its direction in a three-dimensional space, then put it back on the paper, the two donkeys now would stand in the same direction. Similarly, in our three-dimensional space, you can not put the left hand glove onto the right hand, nor the right hand glove onto the left hand, because either glove would always remanin what it is. However, if you take a right hand glove to the four dimensional space, and put it back in an appropriate way, it will become a left hand glove. When stuck in the inherent mode, we might as well upgrade the dimension, stand on a higher-dimensional perspective, and possibly we may be suddenly enlightened. Didn’t Einstein discover the Theory of Relativity only after upgrading from the three dimensions to four? In the present intelligent era which integrates both virtual and real, you can also add a dimension of virtual space if you can not solve a problem in the physical space, fully employing artificial intelligence, big data, blockchain, meta-universe and other technologies to give you a pair of innovative wings.
The third is the "cross-border integration method". There are single-node and local level innovations, and also networked and integrated innovations, and the latter is more and more emphasized in an era of intelligence. Therefore, we should be good at borrowing from others and opening up new boundaries. For instance, most people would think of an image of steel when they talk about a robot, however, in USST’s Machine Intelligence Research Institute, there is an intelligent simulation humanoid robot, which has highly realistic skin and rich expression simulation ability, and also intelligent voice and eye tracking interaction functions. In communication, with flexible arms gestures, it is simply a very amiable living person. The institute made the robot work with the Shanghai Theatre Academy to create a stage play, allowing the robot to perform in roles. Is it unconventional and refreshing? Let's look forward to this "integration of science and art" innovation. And I believe that if you can break the boundaries between disciplines, fields and industries with an open and inclusive attitude, you will surely catalyze such "chemical reactions" such as the integration of science and art, and go into another no-man’s land.
3. What kind of innovation do we need?
Innovation is the soul of a nation's progress and the inexhaustible driving force for a country's prosperity. At present, we are in the "two overall situation" and have to cope with complex risks and challenges. In particular, China needs a major force of innovation to realize national self-reliance and improve the well-being of the people. China especially needs to open up a path of independent innovation with Chinese characteristics through disruptive and original innovation. With technological expertise, our food science and engineering team led by Professor Ai Lianzhong has successfully turned a cheap local food material called tamarind fruit in Yuxi Yunnan Province into food additives like tamarind polysaccharide, raising the price from 0.2 yuan a kilo to 500 to 600 yuan a kilo, and built a complete international industry chain, transforming the mountain resources to sustainable industry. I wish all of you, as a generation full of innovative vigor, could carry on the construction of the motherland, put your professional expertise and intelligence into major strategic areas such as manufacturing power, rural revitalization, life and health, national security, intelligence transformation and contribute your life and blood for the people and the state.
Dear students, "Only innovators make progress; only innovators stay powerful; only innovators would prevail". The fundamental factor of keeping ahead and making breakthrough lies in innovation. Innovation means the rewriting and even subversion of the original cognition and practice. It is an arduous activity full of unknowns and challenges. One needs to experience numerous failures and setbacks before success. When you walk out of the campus and into society, I hope you can stay true to your original aspiration and make great breakthroughs in the no-man’s land in order to create new glory worthy of the country and the people.
Last but not least, I wish all of you a happy memory of the past and a glorious success of the future!