Published on: 2026-07-03
Source: Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University –
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A delegation from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST, China) visited SPbPU. The university, ranked among the top global universities (QS 319, THE 176, ARWU 73), is located in Wuhan, known as China’s “Optics Valley”: it is here that the country’s scientific elite is concentrated. The university is renowned for its engineering and medical schools, is one of the leading universities in Central China, and a participant in the national programs “Double First-Class University,” Project 985, and Project 211.
The delegation was led by Chen Jie, Director of the International Cooperation Department at HUST. During negotiations with SPbPU’s international services, opportunities for cooperation in the scientific field, joint educational programs, and academic mobility of students were discussed. The profiles of our universities largely coincide, so the most promising areas of cooperation were immediately identified: energy, new materials, cyber-physical systems and artificial intelligence, biomedicine, and biotechnology. The Chinese side showed particular interest in SPbPU’s developments in the field of cyber-physical systems, unsupervised neural network learning algorithms, and the management of distributed robotic complexes, which were presented by staff from the laboratories of the Higher School of Cyber-Physical Systems Management and the Scientific and Technological Complex “Mathematical Modeling and Intelligent Control Systems.” The visit concluded with a tour of the Open Education Center and the History Museum of SPbPU. The parties agreed to prepare an official partnership agreement that will formalize the reached arrangements and pave the way for new joint educational programs.
In fact, the interaction between the two universities has been successfully developing for more than two years and has a “horizontal” nature: the initiative comes directly from scientists interested in joint research. This is how the collaboration between Professor Vyacheslav Shkodyrev from the Higher School of Cyber-Physical Systems Management and the director of the School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation (HUST), Professor Houshen Su, a renowned specialist in the management of complex systems, came about. Their acquaintance was initiated by the Chinese side when, in 2024, five leading Russian professors in the field of artificial intelligence, including Vyacheslav Shkodyrev, received personal invitations to a conference in Wuhan.
At the conference, Vyacheslav Shkodyrev presented his developments in the field of cyber-physical systems — an active environment that controls processes, unlike the passive internet. He proposed new reinforcement learning algorithms — a method in which the system learns from its own mistakes by modeling cause-and-effect relationships. Professor Su was particularly interested in this direction, as its mathematical framework opened possibilities for creating self-developing neural networks.
Close cooperation between the research teams of SPbPU and HUST has yielded results in the form of joint publications and participation in conferences. In 2025, a joint proposal by SPbPU and HUST for the project “Advanced technologies for interactive multi-object search, tracking, and delivery of intelligent cyber-physical system under uncertain environments” received support from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation and the Ministry of Science and Technology of China. A postgraduate student of SPbPU and citizen of China, Zhu Yuqing, was involved in this research theme in the SPbPU scientific group. In April 2025, he successfully defended his PhD thesis and now, as an associate professor, continues scientific and teaching work at the UKFS Graduate School, developing partnership ties with universities in China.
Dmitry Arsenyev, Vice-Rector for International Affairs at SPbPU, emphasized: International cooperation does not begin with the signing of documents, but with the direct professional interest of scientists in each other. It is precisely such horizontal connections between professors that become the most reliable basis for university partnerships: they give rise to joint research, publications, projects, and ultimately bring cooperation to an institutional level. I hope that several strong scientific collaborations will soon emerge between Polytech and Huazhong University of Science and Technology.
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