On the morning of June 24, the National Science and Technology Conference, the National Science and Technology Awards Conference, and the Academician Assembly of the two academies were grandly held at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. President Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, attended the event, presenting awards to the nation's highest scientific honours recipients and delivering an important speech. At this event, John Edward Hopcroft, Director of the Hopcroft Center for Computer Science Research at HUST and Honorary Professor at the university, was awarded the China International Science and Technology Cooperation Award.
Professor John Hopcroft is a globally renowned theoretical computer scientist and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He has made foundational contributions in multiple key areas of theoretical computer science, earning him recognition as one of the primary founders and pioneers of the field. In 1986, he was awarded the Turing Award, followed by the IEEE John von Neumann Medal in 2010 and the Simon Ramo Founder's Award from the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2017. Additionally, Professor Hopcroft is an exceptional educator in computer science, contributing significantly to shaping talent development models in the field.
Since 2011, Professor Hopcroft has actively promoted the development and reform of computer science education in China. Invited by the State Council and the Ministry of Education, he has provided invaluable advice for reforming and advancing higher education in China. In 2016, he was awarded China's highest honour for foreign experts contributing to the country's modernization, the “China Government Friendship Award”.His “101 Plan”launched in 2023, aims to advance the development of core curricula in fundamental disciplines and key fields of Four New technologies. This ambitious project, designed to enhance the quality of talent cultivation across Chinese universities, has already achieved significant milestones.
Since 2013, Professor Hopcroft has served as an Honorary Professor at HUST, establishing a long-term collaboration with Professor He Kun. In 2014, they founded the John Hopcroft Lab at HUST, conducting influential research in areas such as social network analysis, graph data mining, adversarial machine learning, and neural network analysis. Their research on community detection algorithms based on local spectra in social networks has become a representative method in the field. In adversarial machine learning, they made groundbreaking discoveries about the importance of gradient accumulation and the scale-invariance of images in model classification. They were the first to draw parallels between adversarial sample generation and standard model training, a concept now widely accepted in the field. Their work on neural networks also introduced new metrics for similarity in hidden layer representations.
Professor Hopcroft has visited HUST annually, engaging in extensive scientific collaboration and co-supervision of graduate students since 2013. He has also contributed to teaching both undergraduate and graduate courses, bringing other prominent international scholars into the classroom. In February 2023, the Hopcroft Center for Computer Science Research at HUST was officially launched, with Professor Hopcroft serving as Director and Professor He Kun as Deputy Director. Since its establishment, the centre has made significant progress, publishing over 10 top-tier conference and journal papers in 2023 alone and winning the championship in the MaxSAT Evaluation 2023 international algorithm competition, among other accolades. In November 2023, the Turing Class of the School of Computer Science and Technology, a special program for nurturing innovative talent in computer science at HUST, was officially launched under the guidance of Professor Hopcroft. The program aspires to become a leading platform for cultivating the next generation of computer science innovators.
Professor Hopcroft's receipt of the China International Science and Technology Cooperation Award is a testament to his enduring contributions to China's scientific research and education. It also affirms the success of the collaborative efforts between Professor Hopcroft and Chinese institutions, including the Hopcroft Center. Under his leadership, the centre is expected to achieve even greater accomplishments in the future.
