Cooperation with the “Optical Valley”: A delegation from Huazhong University of Science and Technology visited Polytechnic

A delegation from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST, China) paid a visit to SPbPU. The university, which is among the top world rankings (QS 319, THE 176, ARWU 73), is located in Wuhan, which is called China’s «optical valley»: it is here that the country’s scientific elite is concentrated. The university is famous for its engineering and medical schools and is one of the leading universities in Central China.

The delegation was headed by the Director of the HUST International Cooperation Office, Chen Jie. During the negotiations with SPbPU’s international services, opportunities for cooperation in the scientific field, joint educational programs, and academic mobility of students were discussed. The profiles of our universities largely coincide, so the most promising areas of cooperation were immediately identified: energy, new materials, cyber-physical systems and artificial intelligence, biomedicine and biotechnology. Of particular interest to the Chinese side were SPbPU’s developments in the field of cyber-physical systems, unsupervised neural network learning algorithms and control of distributed robotic complexes, which were presented by staff from the laboratories of the Higher School of Cyber-physical Systems and Control and the Scientific and Technical Centre «Mathematical Modelling and Intelligent Control Systems». The visit ended with a tour of the Open Education Centre and the SPbPU Museum of History. The parties agreed to prepare an official partnership agreement that would formalise the reached understandings and pave the way for new joint educational programs.

In fact, the interaction between the two universities has been developing successfully for more than two years and has a «horizontal» character: the initiative comes directly from scientists interested in joint research. This is how the cooperation between Professor of the Higher School of Cyber-physical Systems and Control Vyacheslav Shkodyrev and the Director of the School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation (HUST), Professor Housheng Su, a well-known specialist in the field of complex systems control, came about. Their acquaintance took place on the initiative of the Chinese side, when in 2024 five leading Russian professors in the field of artificial intelligence, including Vyacheslav Shkodyrev, received personal invitations to a conference in Wuhan.

At the conference, Vyacheslav Shkodyrev presented his developments in the field of cyber-physical systems — an active environment that manages processes, as opposed to the passive Internet. He proposed new reinforcement learning algorithms — a method in which a system learns from its own mistakes by modelling cause-and-effect relationships. Professor Su became interested in this particular direction, since its mathematical apparatus opened up opportunities for creating self-developing neural networks.

Close cooperation between the research groups of SPbPU and HUST has yielded results in the form of joint publications and participation in conferences. In 2025, a joint application by SPbPU and HUST for the project «Advanced technologies for interactive multi-object search, tracking, and delivery of intelligent cyber-physical system under uncertain environments» received support from the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation and the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China.

Dmitry Arseniev, Vice-Rector for International Activities of SPbPU, emphasised: International cooperation does not begin with the signing of documents, but with the direct professional interest of scientists in each other. It is precisely such horizontal connections between professors that become the most reliable foundation of university partnership: they give rise to joint research, publications, projects and, ultimately, bring cooperation to the institutional level. I hope that in the near future several strong scientific collaborations will emerge between Polytechnic and Huazhong University of Science and Technology.