Introduction

Recently, the Ministry of Education and four other departments released the “AI + Education Action Plan,” which emphasizes the cultivation of AI talent and the deep integration of AI with education.

In the current wave of AI applications, how can new technologies serve education? How can university classrooms resonate with the cutting-edge industries in the Greater Bay Area? Recently, reporters visited Sun Yat-sen University’s campuses in Guangzhou, Zhuhai, and Shenzhen to explore the digital transformation practices of this century-old institution.

Enabling Personalized Education

In a study room at the Guangzhou campus, Lu Zijin, a 2025 undergraduate student from the School of Chemistry, is working on problems related to “chiral carbon configurations.” She uses the “AI class representative” to search for precise knowledge points in her textbook and receives additional related questions. Guided step by step, Lu Zijin gradually overcomes the difficulties in her exercises.

Such “personalized learning assistance” frequently occurs at Sun Yat-sen University. In January of this year, the university launched its self-developed “Yixian Smart Course” platform, which currently offers 102 smart courses. This platform analyzes students’ learning behaviors and quiz performances in real-time, accurately assessing each student’s mastery of knowledge points and intelligently matching personalized learning paths.

The AI platform has also transformed teaching methods. Professor Luo Xin from the School of Physics typically opens the “Yixian Smart Course” platform when preparing lessons. The learning data for the chapter on “Conservation of Angular Momentum” in the mechanics course is clear: 80% of students struggle with the knowledge point of “kinetic energy of rigid body rotation”—30% of them review related lecture videos after class, while five students have a quiz accuracy of less than 40%.

The next day in class, Luo Xin allocates some time to use a real case to help students break down the core logic and common pitfalls of the energy method. After class, the platform continues to assist: students with weak foundations receive reinforcement exercises, while those with more capacity are assigned advanced tasks.

Sun Yat-sen University President Gao Song stated, “Digitalization brings unprecedented opportunities for education. The integration of AI and education is not only a technological revolution but also a profound transformation in educational concepts and teaching models. In this era, we hope to empower higher education to achieve both scalability and personalization through AI.”

Building an Integrated AI Curriculum System

Recently, Wen Yucan, a 2025 undergraduate student from the Department of Chinese (Zhuhai), has been particularly busy. She and her classmates applied for the “AI + Traditional Opera Heritage” project, which has just been approved under the “College Student Innovation and Entrepreneurship Training Program.”

This initiative originated from a general elective course on artificial intelligence taken last semester. After the course, Wen Yucan realized the usefulness of AI’s capabilities in generating language, recognizing images, and processing text for cultural dissemination.

“We insist on building an AI curriculum system based on the ‘integration of general and specialized education’ model,” said Vice President Xie Shen of Sun Yat-sen University. “Core courses for computer-related majors focus on solidifying professional foundations; general AI courses for non-computer majors emphasize understanding underlying logic and theory; and human-machine collaboration courses for all students teach how to use AI in practical scenarios.”

Why establish a separate human-machine collaboration course? Chen Yingqian, one of the course designers for “Human-Machine Collaboration: AI + Medical Imaging,” believes this is more about imparting knowledge than teaching usage skills.

Chen Yingqian stated, “Students need to experience the role and limitations of current AI through numerous real clinical cases and think about how to better collaborate with AI. We hope to provoke deep thinking among students about how to adjust their learning methods and establish a foundational medical knowledge system to become adaptable medical talents in the future amid the AI wave.”

Training Talent for Future Industry Needs

In April 2025, the Ministry of Education and nine other departments jointly issued the “Opinions on Accelerating the Digitalization of Education,” proposing to optimize higher education discipline and professional settings in line with the development of the digital economy and future industries. In the digitally advanced Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, this guidance has translated into concrete actions—frontier industry demands are deeply influencing university discipline construction and embedding throughout the talent cultivation process.

Recently, Lin Min, a 2025 doctoral student from the School of Intelligent Engineering at Sun Yat-sen University, had his understanding of his major “refreshed” after participating in a joint project with a Huawei team.

Lin Min and his team spent months successfully training a “visual-language-action” large model capable of executing long sequence tasks in complex environments and built a robot that performed excellently in laboratory evaluations. However, for enterprises, the “action accuracy” in the lab is merely a passing mark.

“To meet commercial standards, we had to deeply integrate the model with hardware, ultimately enabling the robot to accurately perform tasks such as data center inspections,” Lin Min reflected. “This leap from ‘paper metrics’ to ‘stable operation in real scenarios’ is hard to experience in school.”

Tan Guang, Vice Dean of the School of Intelligent Engineering at Sun Yat-sen University, believes that Shenzhen, as a frontier of China’s technological innovation, gathers numerous global leading enterprises, providing fertile ground for the integration of industry and education in the field of ‘AI + robotics.’ The school collaborates with leading companies like Huawei to build joint practice bases to help students transition from ‘knowledge acquisition’ to ‘value creation.’

At the Guangzhou campus, the “Smart Learning Hall” innovative education practice platform, relying on the National Supercomputing Center in Guangzhou, systematically integrates the “Tianhe-2” supercomputing resources into teaching. At the Zhuhai campus, Sun Yat-sen University leverages its solid disciplinary foundation and data advantages in fields like atmospheric and ocean sciences to form a talent cultivation model of “specialized direction + artificial intelligence,” establishing dual bachelor’s degree programs such as “Atmospheric Science + Artificial Intelligence” and continuously delving into areas like marine AI and intelligent perception to serve the development of the marine economy in the Greater Bay Area.

From Shenzhen’s “industrial practice” to Guangzhou’s “computational foundation” and Zhuhai’s “specialized intersection,” Sun Yat-sen University has formed a complementary talent cultivation network for AI across its three campuses, nurturing future industry talents who understand industries, can innovate, and are capable of practical applications, injecting momentum into the development of new productive forces in the Greater Bay Area.