A group of friends in California and Taipei organized an in-depth ten day trip to the Shanxi province  led by a Chinese tour director. We decided to join the group. The tour started in Xi’an on May 12. We took advantage of the starting point to visit the Xi’an JiaoTung University and the Forum meeting of Chinese department heads and Deans of Automation and Control from May 8-11^th. Our host, Yangtze Professor and Dean of XJTU, Guan Xiao-Hong was most hospitable. He introduced us to many sites, sights, and tastes that we have not experienced before despite four previous visits to Xi’an. Recorded below are observations and photos taken during our 17 day trip.

1.     Automation department head and Dean’s forum. A group of heads and deans of the department of Automation of top Chinese universities have been meeting annually for several years now to discuss the future and trend of automation and control and common problem faced by them. This year they were meeting in Xi’an with the Northwest Industrial University as host. I was invited to give a short talk of my own views. The only news worthy thing to report in my talk is the second hand reported statement by the program director for automation and control of the US National Science Foundation that “Control is dead!”. By this he meant that “control” is a mature subject and that his office will no longer support research in traditional theoretical areas such “robust control, H-infinity, linear matrix inequalities, etc unless extraordinary evidences of breakthrough are provided. This may not be welcome news for many academics but represents the reality of competitive research. It is appropriate that Chinese leaders of academia take note.

 

2.     Professor Guan also took us to visit a five star resort hotel in the famed Chin-lin (秦岭) mountain range reached via a 18 km long tunnel. We also had a chance to see the newly developed Fa-men Temple (法门寺) done by the same developer who built the Da-yen tower (大雁塔) tourist site and the nearby Guanzhong local theme park (罔中风情园)

 

Lobby of the Chin-lin resort hotel

Hiking in Chin-lin





Entrance way to Famen temple

The giant structure seen at the end of previous picture

One of the many giant buddha sturctures along the entrance way to Famen temple

 

A typical shop display in the Guanzhong local theme park

 

3.  Other newly completed tourist site in Xi’an we saw are the expanded tourist development of the Qujiang (曲江) area which is part of the Diayen Tower development and the Romance Park (王宝釧的寒窑). Xi’an is definitely becoming a destination resort.

4.   I also visited XJTU and gave a lecture there on “1960-2010 Fifty years of control research – a personal experience” and saw the impressive center for research on networks. It is possible to have real time video conferencing among Harvard, U. of Connecticut, U.of Massachusetts at Amherst, The Hongkong University of Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiao-tung University and Tsinghua University using the facilities present. Members of these universities comprise the CFINS team at Tsinghua. Such facilities will enable students and faculties at such separate locations to collaborate as if they are at the same place with face-to-face communications. This group is doing high quality first class work indeed.

 

5.     However, it is true that by and large, hardwares in top Chinese universities rival and even surpass their counterpart in the US and Europe. But unlike economic progress, it will take time to match uniformly western academia in quality. This is something money cannot buy overnight.

 

(TO BE CONTIN UED)

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