TSINGHUA University, one of China's top universities, plans to enroll approximately 150 more undergraduates this September, with the aim to cultivate interdisciplinary talents who can innovatively integrate artificial intelligence (AI) application with multiple disciplines.

The university will set up a new school for the purpose, and provide the 150 with liberal education, trying to nurture in them profound AI literacy, technical knowhow and innovative capabilities, Xinhua reported.

Tsinghua's initiative reflects the nation’s strategy of encouraging the research and application of AI, which could motivate other domestic universities to follow suit, said Liu Wei, director of the Human-Machine Interaction and Cognitive Engineering Laboratory at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, as quoted by the Global Times.

Tsinghua University has been a frontrunner in AI talent training and AI-enabled education. Last month, it began to offer a selective course on large language models (LLMs) and generative AI for all graduate students, which became an instant hit in the new semester, according to The Paper.

A university faculty member said that the course is part of Tsinghua’s AI capability enhancement program, designed to instill AI principles and methodologies in students, systematically deepen their understanding of basic AI knowledge, and nurture more “AI+” interdisciplinary innovators, said the report.

“This course provides me with a systematic understanding of the principles of AI and the application of mainstream technology, which is conducive to my research,” Zhang Yiru, a student who has taken this course, was quoted as saying.

In August 2024, China’s Ministry of Education expanded its higher education Plan 101, which aims to advance the cultivation of talents in basic sciences, to include the subject of AI. So far, Plan 101 for AI includes 15 universities, such as Peking University, Tsinghua University, Fudan University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Tongji University. Both Tsinghua and Shanghai Jiao Tong University founded their CollegeAI in April last year, with the latter beginning to enroll undergraduates in the fall semester. Shanghai Jiao Tong University also developed a multimodal AI teaching system, tailoring an AI-powered anatomy course to medical students, Xinhua said.

These involved schools are contributing to the development of "AI+" talents with various programs. Fudan University has fully initiated its AI curriculum building, introducing 116 AI-related courses that cover multi-tiered learning content from beginners to advanced levels, according to its official website. (SD-Agencies)