Thousands of students gather in Shanghai to compete on innovative ideas

Thousands of college students from China and abroad will gather in Shanghai to compete in a contest of extracurricular scientific and technological innovation.

Organizers said a total of 755 projects will participate in the final competition of the 15th Challenge Cup College Students’ Extracurricular Academic Science and Technology Contest.

The competition runs from Wednesday to Saturday at Shanghai University.

Inaugurated in 1989, the biennial competition will for the first time include a special section on “One Belt One Road” themes, with 39 programs submitted by students from China, the United Kingdom, America, Japan, Indonesia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. 

In the past 28 years, the event has attracted more than 13 million students from over 2,000 colleges in China.

Previous winners include Liu Qingfeng, founder of iFLYTEK, a leading key software enterprise of intelligent speech and language technologies. He attended the contest in 1997 as a postgraduate student at the University of Science and Technology of China and won the first prize with his program of a speech synthesis system.

He later started his own business with the project and became the leading provider of intelligent speech technology in China.