December 7th (AMSP/CGTN) – – The third Tengchong Scientists Forum opened on Friday in southwest China’s Yunnan Province, bringing together leading scientists from diverse fields, educators and business leaders to explore how technology can empower high-quality development.
A key highlight of this year’s forum is the Tengchong Scientists Award, presented to two renowned scientists: physicist Xue Qikun, and Xie Xiaoliang, a pioneer of single-molecule biophysical chemistry and single-cell genomics. Each was awarded 10 million yuan, approximately 1.4 million U.S. dollars.
“I’m honored to receive the Tengchong science prize. My students are very happy, because it reflects our work has received recognition, which we fully appreciate,” said Xie Xiaoliang, Academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Director of Changping Laboratory.
Amid global challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and public health crises, this year’s forum focuses on leveraging technology to drive high-quality development.
The event features 11 sub-forums covering a wide range of topics, including new energy, biodiversity and life science. Artificial intelligence, unsurprisingly, has also been a key focus of the discussions.
“AI is coming. The question is, how do we adapt the world to that so that we end up with a good world, not a world where the rich people get better, and the poor people get even worse. It’s a problem, right? So we have to prepare the world in a good way for that,” said George Smoot, 2006 Nobel Laureate in Physics.
As China’s gateway to South and Southeast Asia, Yunnan Province also takes the advantage of this platform to strengthen exchanges with regional partners.
“We are interested in the artificial intelligence, cyber security, Industry 4.0 and smart agriculture. We would like to have collaboration in these fields,” said Aung Ze Ya, Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Science and Technology of Myanmar.
Scientists hope the forum, only in its third year, will play an increasingly important role in fostering broad international scientific cooperation.
“We have a lot of global challenges, energy, environment, and in medicine. We scientists must share the knowledge because it’s knowledge belonging to the mankind. The collaboration and interaction will have to continue,” said Xie Xiaoliang.
At the opening ceremony, two development funds were launched to support the transformation and industrialization of scientific achievements by academicians, experts and enterprises.
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