On June 15th, 2020, the first Cloud Appointment Ceremony of Peking University was held with President Hao Ping issuing letters of appointment to Professor Manuel Blum and Professor Lenore Blum as Visiting Chair Professor of Peking University. They will serve as advisors to the PKU Turing Program, spearheaded by Professor John Hopcroft in 2017, an elite program for educating and cultivating the future leaders in the new era of computing. Professor Baoquan Chen, Executive Director of Center on Frontiers of Computing Studies, hosted the ceremony.  

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Professor Manuel Blum and Professor Lenore Blum conducted an online course named "Conscious Turing Machine: Cognitive & Computational Science" at PKU, which was taken by 27 Turing Class students.

In the acceptance speech, Professors Blum thought highly of Turing Class students. "They are an awesome group of undergraduate students. We found them smart, knowledgeable, well-rounded, politely and extremely nice. They produced high-quality research projects in just three weeks, which also contributed to our own research and thinking. It is a very rewarding experience for us", said Professors Blum.

Manuel Blum, the Bruce Nelson University Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, is a pioneer in the field of theoretical computer science and the winner of the 1995 Turing Award in recognition of his contributions to the foundations of computational complexity theory and its applications to cryptography and program checking, a mathematical approach to writing programs that check their work.

Lenore Blum, the Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, is known for her contributions to the theory of real number computation, for her invention of a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator, and for her efforts to increase the diversity of mathematics and computer science.