From November 8 to 10, the 17th Annual National College Student Innovation Conference was held under the guidance of the Department of Higher Education of the Ministry of Education and hosted by Sichuan University. NEU’s four selected works won one "Excellent Academic Paper" award, one "My Favorite Project" award and one "Best Entrepreneurial Project" award. For two consecutive years, NEU has ranked among the top five nationwide in total points, and has been honored with the "Excellent Organization Award" at the annual conference which is awarded to only 15 organizations nationwide in each edition.
The paper "RUE Net: Advancing Underwater Vision through Real-time Image Enhancement", co-supervised by Hongli Xu and Jingyu Ru from the School of Robotics Science and Engineering, and completed by Guocun Wang, was awarded "Excellent Academic Paper"; the innovation training project "A Bionic-based Underwater Flexible Propulsion Device", supervised by Professor Qunchao Zhao from the School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation, and completed by Haoxuan Qin, Yubing Duan, Zhifeng Lv, Xinxin Cui, and Yifan Xia, was awarded the "My Favorite Project"; the entrepreneurship training project "A Quarrel Which Benefits Only A Third Party - Underwater Bionic Robot Empowering the New Mode of Intelligent Fishery", co-supervised by Mingxu Ma from School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation and Guoqi Feng from School of Business Administration, and completed by Yichen Chu, Siyan Wu, Yahui Wang, and Yang Zhou, was awarded the "Best Entrepreneurial Project". Thus far, NEU has been consecutively awarded "Excellent Academic Paper" for three years, "My Favorite Project" for six years, and achieved a significant breakthrough in the Entrepreneurship Project, winning the award for the first time in seventeen years.
The Annual National College Student Innovation Conference is an important annual exhibition and exchange activity relying on the national college student innovation training programme, which has become one of the most widely covered influential and high-level events with the greatest students' participation in the undergraduate teaching reform across the country. The number of selected and award-winning works for the annual conference is included in the undergraduate competition rankings. NEU attaches great importance to the organization of the annual conference, which is recognized as a national six-star competition, and has been promoting high-quality projects to previous annual conferences for 17 consecutive years through the organization of the Academic Paper Competition, the Exhibition of Project Achievements, and the Pre-defence and Guidance of the Annual Conference. At the final site, the shortlisted project teams actively participated in the communication and exhibition, competing with high-level projects and thesis contestants on the same stage, while gaining wide recognition and praise.
It is reported that the annual conference, with the theme of "All Rivers Run into Sea: See the Future Intellectually", received a total of 1006 projects recommended by the Ministry of Higher Education and local education authorities. After preliminary evaluation by relevant experts and review by the expert working group of "National Innovation Programme", 200 academic papers, 250 innovation and entrepreneurship project reform results demonstrations and 60 entrepreneurship promotion projects were selected, with a total of 510 results selected as finalists at the annual conference. The final round contains three thematic activities: innovation and entrepreneurship project reform results demonstration, innovation academic paper exchange and entrepreneurship promotion project exchange. After a fierce competition, 20 "Excellent Academic Papers", 20 "My Favorite Projects", 20 "Best Creative Projects", 12 "Best Entrepreneurial Projects", and 15 "Excellent Organization Awards" were finally awarded.
