Shenzhen International Center for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SICIAM) was inaugurated Saturday at a ceremony held at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.

CUHK-Shenzhen and Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data will jointly build the center. Zhiming Ma, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has been appointed as the director of SICIAM.

At present, SICIAM has attracted over 40 prominent talents in the industrial and applied mathematics field. The center will focus on three key aspects, namely research on foundations of mathematics for artificial intelligence (AI), the development of intelligent industrial software and the construction of open source ecosystem, and AI and applied mathematics innovative applications.

The center also aims to attract more top talents, promote international cooperation on applied mathematics and work together with industries to solve technological challenges.

The center’s projects will assist Shenzhen to integrate basic research and applied basic research with its local industry to meet the city’s need to upgrade its digital economy, which is also significant to the city’s economic development and social governance.

Yangsheng Xu, president of CUHK-Shenzhen, said at the ceremony that many top universities around the globe value the role of mathematics, which demonstrates the importance of the subject.

Professor Xu expected that CUHK-Shenzhen will cooperate with the center to make real contributions to the development of applied mathematics in the future.

Center director Zhiming Ma said that applied mathematics and AI development will be closely combined in the next decade with exponential growth, which will also become the country’s core competitiveness.

“SICIAM is forming an international team and will cooperate with world-renowned institutes to meet the national strategic needs in the fields of leading basic theory research and key engineering development,” Ma suggested at the ceremony.

“We will spare no effort to build the center into a world-class industrial and applied mathematics research institute,” Ma said.