Teachers and students,

Good afternoon!

Today, we are here to hold a grand opening ceremony of students of Grade 2017 and a commendation ceremony of 2016-2017 academic year. Here, on behalf of all the teachers and students of the school, I send a warm welcome to the 3767 new students from 29 provinces and cities all over the country and the 70 overseas students from Russia, Japan, Korea, Kazakhstan and other countries! Welcome to Dalian Neusoft University of Information! At the same time, I would like to extend my sincere regards to your parents and teachers and my warm congratulations to the collectives and individuals who are awarded today!

Students, in the past one month, you must have been fully engaged. Activities, such as military training, school orientation and college classes, must have allowed you to experience a major shift in learning and the way of life. The first time for you to check-in to school by yourself, to walk into a university classroom, to learn to live independently...The incoming freshness may have made you too busy, but while exploring new life, please don't forget to make a phone call or send a WeChat message to your parents and the people who care about you, to share your harvest each day because your first time living independently is also their first time watching distantly. Hearing from you, they will be most relieved and comforted.

Students, your rich and colorful university life has begun from Dalian Neusoft University of Information. In here you can find internationally accepted philosophy of education, integration of industry and teaching, application oriented system, cultivation mode that can promote students' knowledge, ability and quality simultaneously, high-quality educational resources that connect the front edge of industry and face the industry development, civilized, harmonious and uplifting educational environment, as well as the loving and responsible teachers who will accompany you to the future. In here, you will harvest your growth in learning and practice; build your friendship while getting along with students from all over the country; and better your character as you pursue ideals and overcome difficulties. In here, only the sweat can measure the distance between you and your dream, and your future on the university campus will be defined by yourself.

First of all, to define your future, you must make your goals clear before your journey. “He who has no direction or purpose will never be aware of any great hope, nor will he carry out any great undertaking”. At the very beginning when Ren Zhengfei founded HUAWEI, in order to break the multinational companies’ monopoly of communication equipment market, he decided to live on technology and conduct independent research and eventually led HUAWEI to become a global leader in the communications industry. For young people, the significance of goals is even more important. "Forewarned is forearmed." If you want to step into the society with full harvest from the campus in four years, you need to think seriously about your college plan from today and establish an overall objective which is practical and challenging, and a number of gradual, short-term goals, to guide you to realize and go beyond each of them persistently.

Secondly, to define your future, you have to stand on the solid ground to create possibilities. Dreams without the wings of diligence, are nothing but fantasies. The university stage is the golden age of knowledge, but these four years, including winter and summer vacation, holidays and internships, looking for work, are just no more than 1400 days, which are no more than 35000 hours. According to the ten thousand-hour law, anyone in any field will need at least ten thousand hours of continuous exercise to become an expert from a novice. You can think about it. What expert do you want to be in your college life for four years? Can you devote at least ten thousand hours for this goal? Our 2007 graduate, Li Zhishuai, from computer science and technology major, devoted all his time and energy into the study and practice of IT technology from freshman year and became a technology star of the school. After graduation, when working with Lenovo, he was selected to be the on-site technical support for 2008 Beijing Olympic Games because of his excellent technical skills. After leaving Lenovo, he successfully founded his own cloud computing company in Zhongguancun. I hope that all of you will work hard for your dreams, and let every bit of your persistence and accumulation become the power to promote yourself and to better yourself.

Thirdly, to define your own future, you need to learn to think to stimulate innovation. The university education is different from the secondary school stage. It is no longer a passive study, or study for the examination. It is to study independently, to think, to learn and to apply. I hope that in the process of active learning, you can often ask questions and think critically; change the angle and think dialectically; base ourselves on the overall situation and think comprehensively. Thinking is to understand the knowledge of books and ideas, rather than rely on the one-sided speeches and views on micro-blogs or in the circle of friends; it is to follow the great scientists and writers, instead of the blind pursuit of the eye catching stars and web celebrities. In the process of thinking, you will gain a lot of ideas, I encourage you to boldly put those ideas into action and let the flame of creativity burn. Today's Internet of things, big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence are changing our lives and work rapidly and profoundly. Google AlphaGO beat the professional players successively for 60 games; the probability of correct detection of artificial intelligence for malignant tumor is 50% higher than average doctors; industrial robots increased labor productivity by 3 times; Machine Translation has achieved instant translation for more than 10 languages; 90% of the news in The Associated Press is now automatically generated by computer. Many scientists and entrepreneurs have predicted that in the future, almost all of the jobs which rely on repetitive skills will be replaced by AI, which means that half of the world's jobs will gradually disappear, but only in creativity and innovation, that AI will never surpass human beings. Therefore, if you learn to think and innovate, you will be able to gain the core competitiveness of the talents in the information age.

Fourthly, to define your future, you should make good friends so you can grow together. College friendship often lasts a lifetime. Many people succeeded because of their friends who share the same ambitions and interests. Take Ma Huateng, Tencent's founder, as an example, his co-founder, Zhang Zhidong is his classmate; the movie "Chinese partner" is based on the true story of the three founders of New Oriental, they are Yu Minhong, Xu Xiaoping and Wang Qiang. They are also alumni. In our school there are many such examples, such as the 2011 graduate Liu Jun and the 2012 graduate Li Zhenning. They are the "brother soldiers" on their way of entrepreneurship. They had been very good partners in their school years. They founded Sainti Technology which has become the leading mobile application design and development service providers in northeast. They have returned back to their alma mater to recruit talents for a number of years, which has been called the "Neusoft partner" model by younger schoolmates. Therefore, I hope that you can build a healthy circle of friends in college and make good friends. Learn to communicate, cooperate, tolerate and devote while getting along with them. This will be a precious treasure for your whole life.

Students, in June this year, Premier Li Keqiang came to visit our school and said: "you face the future, represent the future, and must be able to grasp the future". Here, I sincerely wish you a happy, exciting and fulfilling college time on the beautiful campus of Neusoft and with your wisdom, hard work, and passion of innovation, to define your future and the future of Dalian Neusoft University of Information!

Thank you!