Ceremony celebrates students who give back to the community

One hundred and seventy student teams from Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University were commended for their contribution to the community through volunteer work and research projects at the 2018 Summer Social Practice Sharing and Award Ceremony.

Each year, many XJTLU students spend their summer holiday volunteering or working on projects to develop new ideas and create new knowledge as part of the Summer Social Practice programme at the University.

This year’s ceremony emphasised the theme of ’charity’, highlighting how student projects can benefit the wider community.

Professor Qiuling Chao (pictured below), vice president of XJTLU, Alex Mackrell, lecturer at the International Business School Suzhou, and Rong Fang, a representative for the Amity Foundation, were all invited to share their thoughts on charity.

Professor Chao said it was a social responsibility for students to engage in charity. She told the audience, which was largely made up of XJTLU students, that they could learn a lot about society through charity work.

“These experiences help you to put what you have learned into practice and improve your practical capabilities, to broaden your horizon, to make friends, and to most importantly realise and develop your sense of self and self-worth,” Professor Chao said.

“I hope that more and more young students will take part in charity work, sharing your passion with society along with your wisdom, knowledge and kindness.”

In addition to volunteering their time to charities, many other students chose to work on making their ideas a reality during the summer vacation.

A team of Year Three students from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering developed a facial recognition system and presented the process of face identification to the audience to explain how faces are identified after having been photographed.

Project leader Jiamin Wang (pictured above, right) introduced the presentation, stating the team were interested in facial recognition, but it was quite difficult for junior students to develop such a system in two months.

“We taught ourselves almost all the relevant knowledge necessary for the development of the system, including Principle Component Analysis (PCA), Eigenface, Support Vector Machine (SVC), Euclidean distance and more,” he said.

Their project ‘An Analysis of University Students in Suzhou of Applying Facial Recognition to the Intelligent Campus and Face Identification System’s Reliability’ won first prize at the ceremony.

“We have learned a lot about team work and have gained professional knowledge from our experiences in this social practice programme,” Jiamin said.

“While we faced a number of challenges along the way, we were so interested in facial recognition technology that the 13 of us in the team unanimously agreed to carry on with our research.”

Yuru Chen (pictured below), a second-year student from the Department of Urban Planning and Design, showed the audience the pictures of the winter sweet flowers beside the Foundation Building in the winter sun, cherry blossoms near the Science Building in the spring breeze, and fragrant osmanthus flowers to the north of the Electrical Engineering Building in the autumn dusk.

She asked the audience how many species of plants there were on the XJTLU campus and whether they knew the names of the plants. During summer, her team made an Illustrated Handbook of Plants in XJTLU, detailing the variety of plants on campus.

“We collected 151 species of plants and took pictures, recorded the location and searched for the relevant information about them,” she said.

The ceremony was hosted by the Centre for Student Affairs and supported by the Volunteer Academy of XJTLU.

By Bo Kou and Hongjing Gou; photos by Yuanyuan Du
Translated by Boqiang Xiao; edited by Rosanna Galvin