On December 14, 2015, Masami Yamamoto, Chairman of Fujitsu Ltd, accompanied by a delegation visited Peking University (PKU). Lin Jianhua, President of PKU; Li Yansong, Vice President and Ni Jingren, Academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences and Vice President of College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering received the guests.
Mr. Lin Jianhua first warmly welcomed Mr. Masami Yamamoto and the whole delegation of Fujitsu, mentioning that educational has always been an emphasis of the corporation in cross-field cooperation. Then Mr. Yamamoto gave a brief introduction of Fujitsu Ltd., in which he presented from aspects of history, business philosophy and major industries.
Mr. Yamamoto then introduced the Fujitsu’s cooperation with China. It stared with China-Japan submarine cable project in 1974, and in 1998 the first Research and Development (R&D) department of Fujitsu began operating in China. Fujitsu Shanghai was officially established in 2000, which is now its Chinese headquarter. Nowadays, a total of 46 subsidiaries of Fujitsu Ltd., focusing separately on different processes in manufacturing to form a rigorous industry chain, are creating a revenue of 200 billion yen (approximately 1660 million dollar) a year.
Mr. Lin appreciated Fujitsu’s past achievements and contributions to the world. He pointed that PKU is now in a stage of reform and restructuring to keep pace with the world significantly defined by “big data”. PKU also possesses many research centers for frontier technology, according to Mr. Lin, and is willing to collaborate with Fujitsu in a more profound way to find possibilities of new technology.
Then, both sides discussed the research center co-established by both university and Fujitsu. The center mainly focuses on the R&D in areas such as semiconductors, language analysis and information retrieval since its foundation in 2004. One thing he specially noted was that a PKU graduate is now the head of department for optical field of Fujitsu. Aiming at exploring alternatives, the major research area of the center in the past three years is environment protection. It also has cooperation with CareBeijing, an integrated observational study of the atmospheric environment in Beijing and Northern China, initiated by Zhu Tong, PKU Dean of College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering. Two institutes work together to carry out research upon PM2.5 which is the major source of air pollution in Northern China, in order to develop applicable plan for solving the problem. Japan has gone through a similar period, that economic growth is based on environmental devastation, said Mr. Yamamoto. Therefore, Japan’s experience and achievements in curbing pollution would provide inspirations for China to form its own way.
Finally, Mr. Ni Jingren introduced the collaboration projects between PKU and enterprises. With the general idea of “open innovation”, the projects are operated with the engagement of both PKU and related enterprises: PKU establishes laboratories with the financial support provided by enterprises, and two sides co-operate to carry out the research. He also pointed out the existing problems with scientific research in PKU, which is the research is mostly short of regulations and rather mere curiosity-driven. He then said that the research centers had brought some relevant Japan’s technologies in, including the one applied to nuclear-radiation detection after the earthquake in Japan in 2011, which could function in a similar way in face of environment problems.
Written by: Liu Xiya
Edited by: Wei Wei
