The 6th Youth Forum on Frontiers of Computing was held successfully online from October 17th to October 18th, 2020 with 10 faculty candidates from world-known universities, e.g. MIT, University of Oxford, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, etc. being invited to talk about their studies. Dr. Feifei Li, Vice President of Alibaba Group, and Prof. Le Song from Georgia Institute of Technology were invited as keynote speakers.

Baoquan Chen, Executive Director of CFCS, Peking University, chaired the forum. Professor Chen showed everyone around the environment of Courtyard No.5, Jingyuan where CFCS’s office is located, and welcomed keynote speakers and young scholars for attending the forum remotely.

At the opening ceremony, John Hopcroft, Director of CFCS, Peking University, highly affirmed China's rapid development and achievements in higher education in recent years. Professor Hopcroft said China has the best students in the world. To produce the next generation of talent, Peking University is building a center of the quality of top universities in the world where the pressure for faculty to raise research money and publish papers has been eliminated. Instead, we encourage faculty to focus on basic research and quality of teaching.

Dr. Feifei Li, Vice President of Alibaba Group, ACM Distinguished Scientist, delivered the keynote speech named Cloud Native Database Systems for Enterprise Applications, introducing the key technical ideas towards building cloud native database systems and the application and integration and big data and AI techniques in such systems.

Dr. Le Song, associate professor from Georgia Institute of Technology, presented a learning framework to address combinatorial optimization problem by combining graph neural networks with supervised learning, unsupervised learning, or reinforcement in the keynote speech.

In the Young Scholar Talk session, speakers and PKU faculty and students had a heated discussion around the cutting-edge problems and latest achievements in theoretical computer science, quantum computing, computer vision, machine learning, reinforcement learning, robotics, and etc.

The center hosts the CFCS Youth Forum on Frontiers of Computing twice a year, which has become a platform for attracting talented young computer scientists from around the world. We invite candidates to give talks to introduce their research during the forum and take the opportunity to introduce the center to them. With an ever increasing dynamic in the Chinese IT industry and partnership with universities, we also invite industry leaders to explore collaboration opportunities.