Frederic Dumaze, Vice President, Université de Marne-La-Vallée, France

Dear President Zhang Ailin, distinguished guests and friends,

I am very happy to be here today. Regrettably, our president was unable to come to the site to discuss with you today. I am speaking on behalf of my school.

Let me briefly introduce our situation, and then discuss our imagination under the Belt and Road Architectural University International Consortium. First of all, I would like to share with you that the congratulatory letter from our president was written to President Zhang Ailin and sincerely congratulated the establishment of the Belt and Road Architectural University International Consortium. This is a great achievement because we are able to bring together so many universities to deepen the cooperation of the academic community.

Next, let's talk to you about our school. Universitéde Marne-La-Vallée, is abbreviated as UPEM. As you can see, this location is not very far from Paris, just 20 minutes by train. And UPEM is very close to the airport. This location is very good, just in the middle of the center of Paris and the outskirts of Disneyland.

To further introduce, our school actually has a long history. It is mainly composed of seven university departments. Our main task is education and scientific research. Our advantage is to provide students with many opportunities for training and practice. At the same time, we also have apprenticeship projects with many schools. Therefore, almost 25% of the students have participated in the apprenticeship practice training. Moreover, we also have many professors and more than 500 graduate students engaged in research. Then let me introduce you further to our school situation. We will provide a lot of degrees. Some are technical degrees. Some are engineering degrees. And most of them are master's degrees. We have a total of 54 undergraduate degrees and 90 master's degrees. Most degrees include apprenticeship practices, and we are also very active in international cooperation. We have also joined the Erasmus Project, which is Europe's largest collaborative project for education both inside and outside Europe. Moreover, we have reached more than 200 cooperation agreements with partner schools, and we will further expand the scope of our cooperation. Under the new consortium, we will further expand the scope of our cooperation. Then, in the next step, we will consider launching some joint degrees, and we are currently working on this.

Of course, we will also use the consortium to explore new opportunities, such as new joint degrees. For our cooperation with China, it is also very relevant. We have cooperation with Baotou, Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan and Yancheng, and we also have cooperation with Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture. In addition, we also participated in a special training program, the Sino-French HVAC Project. We are very happy to be involved in this process and are now preparing to launch a double degree.

In my opinion, including our presidents, we believe that our Belt and Road Architectural University International Consortium is a very effective tool to strengthen cooperation and help us to establish a cooperative network and diversified cooperation projects. At the same time, we also have a series of resources to better develop new cooperation projects with different partners. From the perspective of our school, we also hope to further launch our Future Project. What is a Future Project? This Future Project is actually a very large research project, mainly dealing with three challenges: the first is the construction of a smart city. First, we need to define what the smart city really means. Because whenever and wherever, we are talking about smart cities now, but we must be clear about what a smart city is. Then there is a smart city with predictions. Everyone has different interpretations and understandings of this concept. At the same time, we still have an important connotation, which is to design the city for the future. Therefore, we need to integrate all aspects of the city into the design process, and we must ensure that we have a large-scale practical approach. Let us promote the practice in the laboratory to a wider scope. We also hope to be able to work with social and economic partners to achieve the connection between industry, academia and research. In order to achieve this goal, we have launched a series of cooperation in France. We also cooperated with President Zhang Ailin and received her support. This helped us to establish a platform for academic leadership in the future city, and allow us to connect different universities and jointly establish such an academic consortium. Here you can see that all the members are listed, including some engineering universities and laboratories. Moreover, we will also choose a school with a research background which is not very large in scale but is very good itself to join in our future urban consortium, and it is not limited to universities in France. Our aim is to further expand the scope of our members.

Our aim is to improve the education and research work in our cities. But we also hope to work together to strengthen our research capabilities and to translate the results of the university into results that benefit society.

Next, I will tell you about the future of our future cooperation. We need to have a communication project that will allow us to further expand our cooperation. Our aim is to enable our university professors to work together on research and to launch some joint master's programs. One of the main points is to explore how to launch a PhD student project. Now let's introduce the projects we have now. We also hope to increase the number of doctoral students. At the same time, we also hope to innovate at the management level of doctor and doctoral colleges. And we also want to encourage more interdisciplinary development. For example, let our construction profession and the business community to achieve better docking. And we also hope that we can better transform the results of our research into a good policy.

Next we hope to further implement our graduate programs in all aspects, including cities, transportation, scientific engineering, and environment, as well as mathematics and information communication. Previous speakers have mentioned the role of computer modeling and mathematical modeling in engineering, and this is also critical for urban management.

Another important direction is to organize the market and institutions. Of course, the society and cultures are also a very important point. Then the tools we work with include several different forms: The first is to make full use of the Applied Science Institute, which is also a unit under our school. We are also willing to open it to other units because we believe that different areas can solve different problems. But sometimes, we also need some help from the outside world. Because I think that many problems have commonalities in the environment we live in. We can use the stone of other mountains to attack the jade, and help others with the help of others to achieve mutual benefit and mutual assistance. In general, we strengthen the combination of industry and education on the one hand, and strengthen cooperation with other research institutions on the other hand, including cooperation in advanced materials such as nanoscience and inorganic materials. And we actively explore cooperation models. To further strengthen cooperation, I think these two topics are very important to us. This is what everyone can see on the PowerPoint. Thank you very much!

(Compiled according to the shorthand record at the conference)