On November 3rd, AI-HSS hosted the 16th "Humanities × Technology" Thinkers’ Forum. The theme of this forum was "Challenges and Opportunities for studying language learning and language processing in the digital technology era ". Li Ping, the Sin Wai-kin Foundation Chair Professor of Humanities and Technology at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Chair Professor of Neuro-Linguistics and Bilingualism in the Department of Chinese and Bilingualism, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Vice Dean of the PolyU Hangzhou Institute for Technological Innovation, has been specially invited to be the keynote speaker.

At the beginning of the forum, Professor Lei Ruipeng, Vice Dean of AI-HSS, presented Professor Li Ping with a letter of appointment as a member of the Advisory Committee on behalf of the Institute.

Subsequently, Professor Gao Shan from the School of Foreign Languages extended a warm welcome and sincere gratitude to Professor Li Ping for his visit to the UESTC for exchange. She briefly introduced Professor Li Ping's main research directions and outstanding academic achievements in the fields of neuro-linguistics and bilingual cognition.

In the lecture, Professor Li systematically shared a number of cutting-edge research achievements of his team in the field of language learning and cognitive neural mechanisms. He pointed out that through a research method combining brain imaging technology with behavioral experiments, it was found that having brief social interactions with teachers (including real people and AI) before class can not only significantly improve learning outcomes but also promote the synchronization of activities in key brain regions of students, specifically manifested as an enhancement of neural alignment patterns. This discovery provides important empirical evidence for revealing the neural basis of efficient language learning.

In addition, Professor Li reviewed the development of model-brain alignment research over the past decade, emphasizing that this field has gradually expanded from the lexical level to the sentence and even discourse understanding level. Among them, language models capable of predicting the next sentence are closer to the neural mechanisms of human discourse understanding, providing important inspiration for the optimization of artificial intelligence language models.

During the Q＆A and interaction session, the teachers and students on the spot engaged in in-depth discussions on core topics such as "The exploration path of the deep connection between AI models and the human brain", "the possibility of aligning the values of the human brain and large models", "the realization methods of AI ethical learning", and "the impact of AI translation models on human translation". Professor Li Ping responded that current alignment research still mainly focuses on cognitive facts, while alignment at the value level is a more complex and systematic challenge. It is necessary to promote the deep integration of artificial intelligence and the humanities and social sciences, and jointly address the ethical and cognitive problems brought about by social changes through interdisciplinary collaboration.

At the end of the lecture, Hu Jiehui, Dean of the School of Foreign Languages, summarized Professor Li Ping's wonderful lecture and once again expressed his welcome and gratitude for his presence. This lecture attracted teachers and students from both China and abroad from various majors. They engaged in international discussions on cutting-edge topics such as computational neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and educational practice. It not only provided a brand-new perspective for the academic community to understand the mechanism of language acquisition but also offered significant practical inspirations for the innovative development path of intelligent education.