Fudan University
Founded as the Fudan Public School in Shanghai, China back in 1905, one of China’s leading institutions of advanced learning and higher education has offered undergraduate programs and later renamed itself as the Fudan University in 1917. In 1929, this Chinese university changed its educational system and introduced four new departments namely journalism, civil administration, law and education.
In 1937, the university founded four schools composed of Arts, Sciences, Law and Business and comprised of 16 departments, a secondary school, an experimental secondary school, and two elementary schools for compulsory education. During the founding of the People’s Republic of China In 1949, the school went to become of the country’s premiere universities with Chairman Mao Tse-Tung personally handpicking the Fudan University making it one of the country’s elite institutions.
In 1952, colleges and universities in China underwent major readjustment and reshuffling. Fudan University in effect lost its department of applied disciplines, especially those related to arts and sciences, together with other Universities in East China. Though losing some major departments, it was during these times that the school was able to improve its core disciplines and saw its faculty re-energized.
Moving on to modern times, in April 27, 2000, the university merged with the Shanghai Medical University giving the school its own college for medical sciences and is better equipped and far more advanced.
Today, the Fudan University has 77 academes and graduate schools, and a total of 112 research centers. To prove that they are on the right step towards being a leading university, not only in China and Asia but in the entire world, the university has recently unveiled their own weather robot that can tell about the weather conditions at the Shanghai World Expo’s Meteorological Center.
The Chinese institution has also been instrumental in developing several smart robots aimed to make home life easier, especially for the older populace. These robots have child-like abilities and can learn new things just by following human voice commands.
Also developed by researchers at the Fudan University was the FUWA robot, which was designed to teach Chinese students the English language. It stands 3 feet tall and 2 feet wide. Equipped with an LCD touchscreen monitor, this robot is used to interact with children and can also be an entertainment robot. Furthermore, this Fudan Intelligent Robot has speech recognition software for Mandarin and English, which is being used to teach the English language.
