The capstone to the UW’s week of events in China was a gathering of alumni from across Asia following the Huskies’ 77-71 victory over Texas in the Pac-12 China Game.
The raucous crowd cheered the players, Coach Romar and President Cauce, took pictures with members of the UW Cheer & Dance squad, and met friends and fellow Huskies from more than a half dozen chapters around the region.
When the Huskies and Longhorns tipped off, it was just like any other college basketball game. The stands were filled with cheering alumni decked out in their school colors. UW Cheer & Dance and Harry the Husky rallied fans. There were even contests during timeouts, a “kiss cam” and a halftime show.
But a closer look at the bilingual signage, and hearing announcements in Mandarin and English, made it clear this was like no other college basketball game.
The Pac-12 China Game in Shanghai marked the first time an American basketball league – college or professional – had held a regular-season contest in China. And it capped the end of months of preparation by the UW men’s basketball team for its week-long experience in the world’s most populous nation.
A wall of purple backed up the Husky bench, with alumni from all over the region and even the United States streaming to the Mercedes-Benz Arena to cheer on the team. It was close all the way, and tied at halftime, but in a fitting crescendo to the week, the UW beat Texas 77-71.
What does innovation look like? At Disney Research China it looks like a modest, four-story historic building in Shanghai’s Xuhui District. Fellow UW Innovation Summit speakers Adina Mangubat, Ben Waters and I were invited inside for a tour to find out why such an unassuming place from the outside is on the frontier of building sciences.
Disney Research China is a part of Disney’s global network of labs and the only one dedicated primarily to research of the built environment. Their vision is to develop scientific and engineering knowledge of the natural synergies in urban infrastructure. They are using the $5.5 billion dollar construction of the Shanghai Disneyland Resort as a testbed for cutting-edge construction and environmental engineering technologies and processes. Their hope is to apply the lessons learned there to reduce the environmental impact of Disney’s construction and operations around the globe.
They started with the building that houses their own research facility. Cheryl Chi, who holds her Ph.D. degree from Stanford University, gave us a tour of the 4,500 square foot facility. To renovate the building, the team started with a laser scan of the building that helped generate a digital, 3-D rendering of the existing structure. They then used Building Information Modeling, or BIM, a sophisticated computer-aided design tool, to coordinate the design and construction of the structural and building systems, and interior fit-out. Through the use of BIM and integrated system design, the design team was able to squeeze the mechanical system into one-third of the typical ceiling space to optimize the use of the limited floor-to-ceiling height. BIM is the key research topic for several lab members including Chi and Helen Chen, who both received their degrees at Stanford, one of the world’s leading experts in these systems.
The result is a building that rivals the smartest buildings in the world. It includes an integrated building management system (IBMS) that optimizes energy and water consumption with comfort of the people inside the building. The system analyzes real-time data in close to 400 sensors that monitor 13 metrics, including temperature, humidity, daylight and air quality, and then makes necessary adjustments for efficiency and comfort. Solar panels on the roof supplement the power for the buildings’ electrical outlets. Inside, the design leaves mechanical systems exposed, allowing visitors (like us) to marvel at the ducts, pipes and conduits running throughout the building, a choice that Chi said was rare in China but is seen as a cool urban design aesthetic in the west.
One of the key projects for the Disney Research China lab is designing new ways to measure and plan for efficient district-scale infrastructure to support sustainable cities. In addition to using such sensor data and analysis on a building-by-building case, they are working on using data from entire district of buildings to quantify relationships between design features and performance of urban infrastructure systems. Their findings could have implications for how cities rethink the delivery of water and energy to neighborhoods and could improve the health of urban ecosystems.
We were there in part to exchange ideas about the direction of “engineering project organization,” a type of work that both Chi and Chen do and that we do in the lab that I co-direct with Carrie Sturts Dossick in the UW Department of Construction Management. The goal for both of our labs is to improve the engineering outcomes of high-performance projects by improving how people collaborate on hard problems. In that sense, innovation often looks like multidisciplinary labs like Disney’s, where teams of people with different types training work together to create the future — one design decision at a time.
Gina Neff is an associate professor of communication; Adina Mangubat is CEO of Spiral Genetics and a 2009 graduate; and Ben Waters is a Ph.D. candidate in electrical engineering and CEO of Wibotic Inc.
The penultimate day of the UW’s week of events in China featured the University’s inaugural Innovation Summit, preceded by a gathering of alumni leaders from around Asia.
The summit featured the work of four UW innovators — faculty members Gina Neff and Shwetak Patel, Ph.D. candidate Ben Waters and 2009 graduate Adina Mangubat — followed by Q&A sessions moderated by Vice Provost for Innovation Vikram Jandhyala and Shanghai Dragon TV’s Yuan Ming.
The summit also included keynote speeches by Ralph Haupter, CEO of Microsoft’s Greater China Region and Wang Jian, co-founder and president of BGI, as well as remarks by President Ana Mari Cauce, Jiande Chen, CEO of IMAX China Ltd., and Chris Gregoire, CEO of Challenge Seattle and former governor of Washington.
In the morning, alumni leaders from around the region gathered for updates on the UW in a range of areas, from student recruitment to research. Seven alumni chapter presidents were honored by Cauce for their service to the UW.
The week concludes Saturday with the Pac-12 China Game (7 p.m. Friday Seattle time) and an all-Asia alumni and friends reception.
With less than 48 hours left before the big Pac-12 China game, the UW Men’s Basketball team took in the sights of Shanghai, observing monks, visiting historic sites and practicing their Mandarin with locals. The Huskies also gave presentations at a temple as part of their class with English Professor Shawn Wong.
And today the team joined in a fun-filled, Special Olympics basketball clinic and scrimmage with student athletes from Shanghai Pudong Special Education School and staff from the U.S. Consulate General.
Check out this video of the team’s Shanghai adventures:
Photographers have been capturing scenes from the first half of the #UWinChina events, from a visit to Tsinghua University, to meeting Jack Ma at Alibaba’s headquarters, to experiencing some of the history and culture of China. Here are a few of our favorites.
All photos courtesy of Dan Schlatter (UW), Chad Ingraham (Shanghai) and the Pac-12
Extended Gallery
Visit UW Athletics’ site for more photos of Huskies in China.
You are invited to join us for a day-long dialogue on the current status and future of the Arctic Council including some of the founding voices in the Arctic Council and heads of the Permanent Participant organizations. Please join us for all or part of the day (see the program for presentation times). No registration necessary.
Friday, 20 November 2015, 8:30 a.m.- 4:30 p.m., Odegaard 220, University of Washington
The Arctic Council is the leading intergovernmental forum promoting cooperation, coordination and interaction among the Arctic states, Arctic Indigenous communities and other Arctic inhabitants on common Arctic issues. The Arctic Council is a unique international forum both historically and globally. It is the first international institution formed in dialogue with Indigenous peoples and the first where government and Indigenous organizations work on almost equal par to provide coordination for international decision making and activities in and concerning the circumpolar world. According the Griffith (2011) the Arctic Council was the result of a ground swell in civil society where scholars, practitioners and Indigenous leaders engaged in a dialogue concerning the need for an international coordinating body to address Arctic issues from a government and Indigenous perspective.
This workshop – supported by the Korea Maritime Institute, and hosted by the Canadian Studies Center/Arctic and International Relations in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies – will reflect on the almost 20-year history of the Arctic Council, its influence on Arctic policy in North America, and future options concerning its role. Participants will present and discuss their reflections on the Arctic Council including its influence on Canadian and U.S. Arctic policy, and the role of four of the six Permanent Participant organizations who are represented in the Pacific Northwest.
Try everything. Be optimistic. Don’t be afraid of failure. And make sure the people around you are empowered. Those are Alibaba founder Jack Ma’s guiding principles, and the advice he gave student journalists at the company’s Hangzhou headquarters Tuesday.
President Ana Mari Cauce asked Ma for his advice to students from The Daily and HUA Voice Radio who were at the session as part of their coverage of the UW’s events in China and Alibaba’s Singles Day.
Ma said he failed on three attempts to get into college before finally being accepted, and was even turned down from a job at KFC — the only one of two dozen applicants to be denied. He persisted and following a 1995 visit to Seattle, where he had his first experience with the Internet, and then Dallas, where he bought his first computer (“A 486,” he laughed), Ma went on to found one of the largest technology companies in the world.
You may be turned down, Ma said, but stay positive and “don’t turn down yourself.”
Alibaba is sponsoring the Pac-12 China game, as Ma believes team sports are a way to build teamwork and sportsmanship, and not just in athletics. He said that while businesses and nations are competitors, they should also respect each other and follow the rules.
After the Q&A, Ma met with the Huskies and the Longhorns — along with the two schools’ spirit squads and mascots — who presented him with jerseys. The teams each held a short practice on the company’s campus, before taking part in an educational seminar in the afternoon.
Geekwire: Alibaba Founder Jack Ma tells U.S. college basketball players in China to embrace failure
The challenges of our time cross boundaries, so universities and nations must do the same to solve them. That was the message President Ana Mari Cauce delivered during her keynote address Monday at the Tsinghua University Innovation and Big Data Forum in Beijing.
“The future health, prosperity, and well-being of our nations and our planet depend on our ability to cross boundaries and build relationships. Relationships between our students, who are the future leaders of our nations; between our faculties, who are driving innovation around the world; and between our countries, as leading players on the global stage,” Cauce said.
Cauce said the opportunities of “big data” are perhaps most evident in public health, an area that is an area of particular strength for the UW. She discussed work by both the School of Public Health and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation to bring big data to bear on health challenges, from adverse pharmaceutical reactions to the effects of pollution.
IHME’s ongoing work with Chinese researchers and health agencies are identifying community-by-community health trends and challenges, and this enables a systematic approach to solving these challenges.
“Where you’re born matters. And by harnessing big data we’re able to see for the first time just how much it matters, to identify the hidden boundaries between us, and to do something about them,” Cauce said.
A partnership created in June with the launch of the Global Innovation Exchange was further deepened Monday in Beijing as the University of Washington and Tsinghua University signed an agreement creating a 1+1 dual degree program.
The signing ceremony between President Ana Mari Cauce and Chairperson Chen Xu took place on the Tsinghua University campus after the UW delegation — including former U.S. Ambassador to China Gary Locke, former Washington Governor Chris Gregoire and Microsoft Corporate Vice President Rich Sauer — was welcomed at the historic Gong Zi Ting hall.
The dual degree program will provide students with the opportunity to study in both Bellevue and Beijing, earning a master’s degree from each university.
The GIX announcement was the first of a series of events between the two universities this week, with the morning also including an Innovation and Big Data Forum. #UWinChina continues in Hangzhou and Shanghai, capped off by the UW Innovation Summit and the Pac-12 China game.
Puget Sound Business Journal: UW, Tsinghua launch first Global Innovation Exchange degree program
Geekwire: UW and China’s Tsinghua University announce first dual tech degree