Turing winner relishes role in improving education

As one of a number of people helping to make fundamental changes in the way computer science is taught in Chinese schools, John Edward Hopcroft, the 1986 Turing Award laureate from the United States, said he wanted to thank China for allowing him to realize his dream of playing a role in improving education standards.

"One of my desires in life is to help other nations improve education. I discovered that improving education was one of China's highest priorities. And if I'm willing to do something, I'll get full support. That made me decide to focus on China," Hopcroft said in an exclusive interview with China Daily on June 26 after winning the 2023 China International Science and Technology Cooperation Award. He and nine other foreign experts received their awards in Beijing on June 24.

"I believe that talent is uniformly distributed over the world," he said. "China has 20 percent of the world's talent, and providing quality education for as many of these as possible will produce an enormous number of leading scientists. I want to help young people fulfill their aspirations."

Hopcroft, professor emeritus in computer science at Cornell University in New York and an honorary professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University since 2011, won the Turing Award, which has been dubbed the Nobel Prize for computing, for his fundamental achievements in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures. He has also made major contributions to automata theory and computational complexity.

He has helped cultivate top talent in the US and China who have played leading roles in the global development of computer science. From 2011 until just before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, he taught undergraduates at SJTU for about three months a year, accepting the same salary as an assistant professor.

In 2013 and 2017, he allowed Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press to publish compilations of his lecture notes, while insisting that the price of the books not exceed 50 yuan ($6.88). In 2016, he won the Chinese Government Friendship Award, the highest honor a foreigner in China can receive.

Since mid-2021, Hopcroft has spent around six months in China a year, sparing no effort to help SJTU, Peking University in Beijing and the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, Hubei province, build world-class computer science centers and improve talent training.

The John Hopcroft Center for Computer Science at SJTU, which was launched in January 2017, focuses on fundamental issues in computer science, exploring new theories and efficient algorithms.

One research achievement published by Hopcroft and his Chinese colleagues uncovered the structure of a "local hidden community", a useful concept for social network analysis. He said it will provide a tool for analyzing large-scale and complex social networks.

In 2021, the "101 Initiative", a project he initiated to improve the quality of teaching at universities in China, kicked off.

It first focused on computer science departments at the nation's top 30 universities. Having proved successful, it has been extended to other disciplines — including physics, chemistry, economics and medicine — and to many more universities, he said.

Hopcroft said that the initiative took shape after the Chinese government asked him to chair an international board to advise on teaching. The board sought to abolish the metrics for the global rankings of universities based on the number of papers published and research funding, and to replace them with evaluations of undergraduate teaching.

"The mission of universities is to educate the next generation of talent. How much the students are engaged in class and if the faculty members are excited and knowledgeable about the class shall always be at the core," Hopcroft said.

He has also facilitated educational cooperation between SJTU and top universities in the US. He has invited more than 20 world-renowned scholars to offer 42 cutting-edge courses for undergraduates at SJTU, and because of his efforts, about 30 students from the university are sent to US counterparts each year to study for a few months.

"Professor Hopcroft loves to talk to us face-to-face and encourages us to focus on research areas that we feel excited about, and thus do something truly valuable," said Zhang Tianyu, a student at SJTU's Zhiyuan College, which was founded in 2010 to cultivate high-quality innovative talent.

"Also, he often spends time talking with us about how to plan our academic careers, encouraging us to explore the principles, and the related wider range of possibilities, of existing technologies and theories."

zhouwenting@chinadaily.com.cn