The Heart of the Machine is original
Author: Wen Fei
Yu Yong is the founder of the ACM class of Shanghai Jiaotong University, and in the 20 years since its establishment, this class has produced many outstanding talents in the field of computer science and artificial intelligence, such as Lin Chenxi, Dai Wenyuan, Li Lei, Li Mu, Chen Tianqi, and so on. This is not only due to the ACM class, but also inseparable from Yu Yong.
Although the 60-year-old will continue to stay at Shanghai Jiaotong University, for the goal of "training Computer Scientists in China", the four years of the ACM class are too short, and many habits begin to change too late in undergraduate. He is working to expand the educational ideas, methods and resources accumulated over the years to the whole society, hoping that one day his students will receive the Turing Award.
The interview was about in a café in a shopping mall, and I was late for the agreed time, and Teacher Yu stood outside the store waiting for me. When I first met him, I felt "so young", and after talking about it, I found that he was really young, especially when it came to education and student-related topics, I could clearly see the light in his eyes.
Yu Yong is 60 years old this year. He has always wanted to be a teacher, and in 1979, he was admitted to East China Normal University as he wished, becoming the first undergraduate student of the Department of Computer Science. At that time, Mr. Liu Fonian, president of China Normal University, and Mr. Zhang Donghan, head of the Department of Computer Science, left an indelible impression on him, whether it was the charm of a scholar who was polite and humble, or the deep feelings of a generation of educating everyone.
"I was thinking I had to be such an educator." Yu Yong said that he always remembered Mr. Liu Fonian's words at the opening ceremony:
To be a teacher, you must understand education, and a teacher who does not understand education must not educate people.
"It's enough to be a teacher and take a good class, why should I understand education?" Aren't teachers the same as education?" The famous teacher in front of me, who enjoyed the special government allowance of the State Council, seemed to have returned to the time when he first entered the China Normal University: "Therefore, with a lot of simple, seemingly incomprehensible, and inexplicable doubts, I entered such a process of constantly pursuing 'what education should be like.'"
This pursuit has not ceased to this day, and its results have been fruitful. Yu Yong's ACM class founded in Shanghai Jiaotong University in 2002 is now a model of computer education in colleges and universities across the country, as China's first computer top-notch talent training special class, there are many outstanding CS talents, including many "Chinese intelligent golden generation", such as Yitu Technology Lin Chenxi, the fourth paradigm Dai Wenyuan, former ByteDance AI Lab director, now associate professor of UCSB Li Lei, as well as Li Mu, who teaches you hands-on deep learning, XGBoost author, TVM initiator Chen Tianqi, And Yu Yong's original efforts to overcome public opinion and insist on recruiting Li Zhenhui, who is a 2003 graduate of the ACM class and is currently the chief scientist of Hangzhou Yunqi Research Institute. Li Zhenhui won the tenured professorship at Pennsylvania State University in less than 5 years, and returned home with her family in 2018, which made Yu Yong quite moved: "She sold all the big villas in the United States and cut off all the back roads."
In the 36 years since he has been coaching, Yu Yong has always been 100% in front of every student. He begins his book "Hand in Hand" on the tenth anniversary of the ACM class:
"We often hear sighs like this: today's students have no pursuit, lack of ideals, and lack of passion. My answer: Wrong! They're a very ambitious generation, it's just that we can't read them, and even fewer of us are going to study how to read them."
Although each generation of students has its own characteristics, in his view, every student is a lock, and what the teacher has to do is to find the right key. In the face of a group of adult but not fully adult young people, Yu Yong not only pays attention to their study, life and even food and accommodation, but also takes the initiative to discipline their morals and conduct, never afraid of trouble, nor afraid of trouble, because for him, university teachers are not only "teaching", but also "educating people".
The students in the ACM class all know that Mr. Yu taught them to "be human first, then learn to be a scholar, and be a person in a learning middle school.". This is an extremely simple truth, but in the contemporary system and environment, the pursuit of high timeliness and energy efficiency, so that education, especially higher education, increasingly separates "teaching" and "educating people", and uses one point after another, ranking, assessment, and indicators - including students and teachers to achieve large-scale training of talents, the benefits are obvious, that is, schools have sent a large number of high-level labor to society, but the essence of education seems to have passed away in this formal process.
"I have always taken this question with me, why should I understand education as a teacher, and I have been thinking about it for 7 years at China Normal University," Yu Yong said, "At that time, I didn't experience being a teacher, I came to Shanghai Jiaotong University in 1986 to become a teacher, and now I feel more and more what 'education' is."
So, what is education? What is education?
Education ≠ knowledge
There is much discussion about the purpose of education and education, but there is a basic consensus that education is to prepare young people for the rest of their lives.
However, what kind of life does "future life" refer to? What do young people need to prepare for?
China's social and economic development over the past few decades has broadened people's horizons, but the goals and value judgments of education have been narrowing. Schools are more seen as places of competition, with the gaokao being called "a thousand troops crossing a single wooden bridge", and universities being the final exercise before entering a complex real society full of zero-sum games and intrigues. Real-world success is often associated with money, fame, and power, and the more competitive a person is in the competition —primarily someone who scores higher in school, someone who gets more awards, someone with more qualifications, including students, teachers, and even the university itself—the easier it is to be seen as successful.
Why can't test-taking education and quality education change the problems facing Chinese education?
After thinking about it, Yu Yong came to the conclusion that test-taking education and quality education have not changed students from the root of their thinking and concepts.
The child was admitted to the ideal university, but there was no lofty ideal, and Yu Yong had seen too much of this situation. The lack of goals not only leads to confusion, but also makes many excellent students vulnerable to failure.
Since 1996, when he began coaching the ACM International Student Programming Competition (ICPC) at Shanghai Jiaotong University, he was well aware of the problems in education at that time. As the world's most prestigious programming competition, ACM-ICPC tested not only the ability to program, but also the ability to innovate, the ability to cooperate, the ability to communicate and solve problems under pressure, and so on, which were not provided by classroom teaching at that time.
In order to cultivate talents with international vision and world competitiveness, Yu Yong believes that the focus of education is to guide students to aspire and aspire, and by changing or even subverting traditional teaching models and methods, this aspiring education will be integrated into every aspect of teaching, leaving more space for students in the classroom, so that they can learn to think, learn to plan, learn to be autonomous, and then improve the awareness and ability of innovation.
However, even if we are aware of the problem, it is not easy to talk about it, otherwise the "Qian Xuesen's question" will not become a problem that still plagues China's education circles today.
It is reasonable to say that many things should be solved before college, Yu Yong sighed: "But I can only solve it in college, think of this method, think of that method, you said that the habits developed in more than ten years, only give me four years..."
In 2002, Yu Yong led the Shanghai Jiaotong University ACM competition team to win Asia's first ICPC World Championship. Taking this as an opportunity, the ACM class was approved to be established, and Yu Yong finally had the experimental field to practice his educational philosophy and methods, and he set the goal for this class to be-
Train computer scientists in China.
Let students read with dignity
20 years ago, "computer science" was still a slightly unfamiliar concept to the Chinese people, and Chinese could not make their own general-purpose CPUs is the mainstream view of the industry.
In order to preserve this precious test field, Yu Yong showed outstanding courage and achievements, including leading the team to win the ICPC World Championship twice, making Shanghai Jiaotong University the "ICPC Triple Crown", and Yu Yong himself won the best coach award and lifetime achievement award of the competition.
But he knows very well that gold medals are a means rather than an end, that competitions are just one of the many experiences of learning, and that what Yu Yong wants to prove from beginning to end is to put lofty ideals into the hearts of a group of young people in their 20s who can really change the world.
Today, the ACM class has developed and summarized a unique set of computer science education methods and systems, some of which seem quite bold today, such as letting students design most of the curriculum design, letting students teach as teachers (counting credits), and each student serving as a teaching assistant for at least two courses in four years (responsibilities include homework and final exam questions), allowing students to enter the laboratory in the summer of the second year, and encouraging them to intern at well-known universities abroad, well-known domestic enterprises or research institutes. Form a relationship similar to passing on between the upper and lower grade students, and so on.
Among them, the teaching assistant system has become a culture of the ACM class, which greatly stimulates the subjective initiative of students. No one wants to let the students see a bad self, and when they make such a person in their hearts, they will intentionally or unintentionally move closer to shaping and consolidating this good image in action.
By translating responsibilities and obligations well into motivation, most ACM students take the initiative to learn and do more in order to be competent in their role as teaching assistants.
When some students first started as teaching assistants, it was easy to come up with more difficult problems, and when the students could not solve it, there would be some pride, Yu Yong advocated that "I hope that every student in the ACM class should have a dignified reading - the purpose of reading is not to compare grades, but to face the future will have the right to choose, choose meaningful and timely things, so that there will be a sense of accomplishment, dignity, and happiness." At the same time, by serving as a teaching assistant, from the different perspectives of teaching and learning, you can better understand yourself, improve yourself, and even learn more about the way of dealing with the world."
"I often tell them that universities are called universities because the resources here are infinite compared to middle schools and elementary schools. As long as you want, libraries, professors, and alumni, all of these can be your resources," Yu yong said.
"College has to face the infinity of life, to learn to take the initiative to learn, if you finish undergraduate and feel that 'learning' is no different from high school, it is really four years wasted." 」
Teachers cater to students, and universities cater to society
What is China talking about in the world?
Numerous studies have shown that allowing students to actively participate in the learning process leads to better educational outcomes, not only in higher education, but at all stages of education.
However, empirical research has also found that students often sincerely believe that listening to a traditional lecture that is carefully choreographed like a concert can learn more, while the exploration and discussion in the active learning process will give them the illusion that they have not learned much.
Perhaps an important reason why active learning has not been implemented on a large scale is this - for students, thinking that they have learned more and actually learning more are two different things, just as for teachers, allowing students to actually learn more and courses to receive higher students' higher ratings are two different things, and the latter is the common criterion for teachers to be assessed.
Now it is too difficult for teachers to come up with questions, otherwise they will offend students, Yu Yong believes that "this is a distortion of teaching and learning."
The ACM class has a famous "student forum", this "class" has a total of 4 times in the first and second years, the content is that each person chooses a topic outside the major, takes turns to give a presentation of about 30 minutes on the stage, then answers the questions and questions of the students, and finally gets a total score according to the scores of all the students, which is accounted for as the admission score. Here, too, students can feel the process of being evaluated as a teacher.
Not only that, but there are also many elements of "active learning", starting with choosing a topic, to deciding which material to collect and explain, to how to present the filtered information.
Yu Yong stressed that the knowledge in the "student forum" is not imparted, he hopes that students can show their views, and views are often related to current affairs, so ACM students will pay attention to society, "pay attention to society can be advocated, I think this is not too much today's universities."
"Students need to have a connection with the reality around them, they can't stay in the air and pavilions, they don't understand the sophistication of people, such students will only think about themselves, they won't think about others... Whether you are reading or starting a business, if you want to do what others don't want, what does society want, then what do you do with it? It must be to find what society needs, to have this kind of observation, acumen, and a sense of responsibility."
Every semester, ACM class students also receive an email from Yong Yu with the theme of "You in the Eyes of Others." He stipulates that students need to submit a copy of their evaluation of their classmates in the semester summary, which can be expectations, thanks, criticism, etc., initially at least 5 people (4 people live in a dormitory, so they must evaluate people in other dormitories), and in recent years it has grown to at least 10 people, close to one-third of the class size. In this way, he hopes to make students take the initiative to pay attention to the things around them and carefully observe the people around them.
"Your knowledge of the world comes from your observation of the world." At the same time, Yu Yong said, he also observed the students in this way. The e-mail received by each student is "purged" by Yu Yong, removing some content that obviously exposes the identity of the evaluator, such as personal names and events, and then summarizing all relevant evaluations. This tidying up process is very draining, but because of this, Yu Yong can deeply understand the overall situation of each student and class with high efficiency, and accurately find the problem, "The students love and hate me, love is their special care and care, hate is their severity and the problems they have."
He also plans to systematically study psychology, as there are now more and more depressed children. He successfully untied some of the students' knots and helped them rebuild their self-confidence, and then he found deep analytical and theoretical support on how to do it.
Yu Yong delivered a speech at the opening ceremony of the class of 2019 in the ACM class, "University, the Journey of Restart". Source: Zhihu user OsS25F
In order to lead, Yu Yong believes that students in the ACM class must not only meet social needs, but also create social needs. The phrase "the pursuit of extremes" appears no less than ten times in interviews.
He firmly believed that if you don't do anything, you should find the highest standard on the road and go in this direction; at the same time, you should not give up until you have traversed all the feasible paths, otherwise it is a waste of time. For example, after students enter the laboratory, they feel that it is not suitable to change directions, and Yu Yong will persuade them to insist on it again, because they have not completed the research project, the evaluation obtained is inaccurate and incomplete, and changing the direction will only repeat the same mistakes.
"Today's children are more and more afraid to make mistakes, when they were young, they were afraid of falling when they walked, and when they grew up, they went to the laboratory for fear of choosing the wrong direction." In fact, the direction is really not so important, the important thing is that you insist on going through a whole set of processes, in this process to exercise the quality, ability, attitude and a lot of things, you can also change to other things." 」 Yu Yong told the heart of the machine.
"Why did I let them go to phD?" In fact, it is to let them recognize themselves in such a process of pursuing the ultimate, because the "doctor" is the highest level that academic research can achieve. Whether or not to read a phD is not so important to me, but the experience of a phD is important for young people, especially Chinese students, you will find that there are many people who want to do things when they graduate from undergraduate, and they don't want to do it when they read a PhD, and during that period they are constantly trying and clarifying their goals."
"It's not that going abroad or studying for a PhD will definitely allow them to re-understand themselves, but it will continue to make them think about it in such a pure environment and figure out what they are doing."
"Most importantly, for most students, I don't think four years of undergraduate education is enough for them to make important life choices."
Train China's Turing Award winners
Yu Yong's dream is to do education all his life, not just higher education, because there are many things that "change from college really too late".
If possible, he hopes to open a university of his own, which will be small and refined, small and beautiful, organically combining general education and professional education, focusing on cultivating students' dialectical logical thinking and other lower-level abilities, in addition to the curriculum, there will be a variety of on-campus and off-campus activities.
"There should not be many disciplines, three or four is good, but the span should be large, for example, with a computer, do not want electronic engineering, avoid homogenization of thinking," Yu Yong said: "The best and diverse backgrounds of students, mathematical physics, humanities and arts, so cross-collision, analysis of problems from multiple angles, imperceptibly, can present different results." That's why he values the cultural and artistic accomplishment of ACM students and supports them in experimenting with new interests and hobbies.
John White, a leading figure in contemporary analytic educational philosophy, pointed out in his masterpiece "Re-examination of the Purpose of Education" that one of the goals of education is to open doors and familiarize young people with all aspects of the good life, encourage them to reflect, discover its value, and determine priorities. In the process, they need a guide who helps them find their own path so they can devote themselves to it and succeed.
The ACM class has produced and continues to cultivate a group of self-reliant, independent, passionate and socially responsible young people who have not only experienced a great experiment in computer science education in China, but their participation itself is the process of forming and transforming China's computer science culture, and this is not just a matter of competition gold medals, the number of top papers or the names of a series of outstanding graduates.
Not all students join the ACM class with joy, some of them fall behind and say that they feel lost, and not every graduate will engage in computer science research, but all the students in this class are glad that they joined the big family, and even many of them left because they were not suitable. Yu Yong said, "As long as you have studied in the ACM class for one day, you are an alumnus of the ACM class."
As Tang Gongming, a 2006 class of ACM class, wrote in "Hand in Hand", Tang Gongming was originally a student at the School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering of Shanghai Jiaotong University, and joined the ACM class by chance:
Remembering an article written by Ma Rong two days ago in honor of Teacher Wang (Note: Professor Wang Lirong, the first lecturer of the "Fundamentals of Modern Analysis" course in the ACM class, died in 2012 at the age of 70), which mentioned that Teacher Wang felt that although he still had no great achievements in his life, he had always had such an persistent opinion, that is, the state should specially train a group of mathematicians so that they can do research with peace of mind, and these mathematicians will definitely be able to repay the society.
I feel like we're in the same ACM class, and we're focused on developing a bunch of computer scientists. Although only a few of us can achieve remarkable results, all of us can give back to society. When we are recognized by others, we will not hesitate to hook it up with the ACM class, spread the good reputation of the ACM class around the world, and attract the excellent next generation to this group. Well, we are also contributing.
When I asked Yu Yong what he meant by a computer scientist, he said without hesitation, "The highest realm– a Turing Award winner, but the process of pursuing this path is more important, and it is precisely because of such a positive goal that they can be pulled." So I always tell them, you just do one thing, do it to the extreme, it's enough."
Reshape the form of teaching and learning
For Yu Yong, education is art and technology. Although art cannot be copied, technology can be passed on. In October 2018, he founded Boyu Education with the support of Shanghai Jiaotong University, which is not a school, but it is a beginning for his teaching philosophy and methods to go out of the university.
At present, Boyu Education offers a series of courses on information literacy popularization and artificial intelligence professional knowledge and skills at different levels from the school age stage to the post-work period. The team is developing a special intelligent teaching platform and artificial intelligence ability assessment system, which can not only help teachers teach, but also promote students' active learning.
Yu Yong believes that the form of education will definitely change, and the future is likely to be mainly online, supplemented by offline. He hopes to build Boyu into a Wikipedia in the field of education and form an open source ecosystem of high-quality artificial intelligence education resources.
At the end of the interview, Yu Yong shared a little of his experience:
We are in a period of great changes in the world and great social changes, although the future is full of too many uncertainties, the only thing we can do is to arm ourselves and strive to do a good job in the "three innings": the eye situation should be broad, the insight is more; the layout should be larger, think more steps forward; the situation should be stable, and every step should be taken well.
Dreams are never used to be realized, they are used to chase,
The dream is not that you have conquered it, but that it inspires and awakens you.
For the sake of dreams, work hard a little every day and enjoy the possibility of realizing dreams,
For the sake of dreams, witnessing a better self is the best gift to yourself.
Cultivating a Turing Award winner is my dream, and it may never be realized, but I enjoy meeting myself differently.
Resources
- YU Yong, eds. Hand in hand[M]. Shanghai: Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press, 2012-06
- YU Yong. Identification and early development of AI top talents. 2021 WAIC Global AI Industry Talent Summit Forum, 2021-07-08
- YU Yong. Experience Frustration Education Implements Elite Cultivation, acm.sjtu.edu.cn/ Class Introduction/Educational Philosophy, 2009-02
- WU Zhihong. A Review of Whitehead's Educational Thought[J]. Journal of East China Normal University (Educational Science Edition), 1985, 3(4): 55-67.
- Deslauriers L. & McCarty L., et al. Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Sep 2019, 116 (39) 19251-19257; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1821936116
- ACM class small transparent sharing. Shanghai Jiao Tong University Survival Handbook, survivesjtu.gitbook.io
- Cultivate AI talents with AI! Yu Yong: "My dream is to do education all my life. Boyu Artificial Intelligence Institute WeChat public account, 2019-05-07
- Ford, Marcus Peter (2002). Beyond the Modern University: Toward a Constructive Postmodern University. Praeger.
- John White. What schools are for and why. Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain IMPACT pamphlet No 14 (2007)
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