Tsinghua University

A public university in Haidian

Tsinghua University is a public research university in Haidian district, Beijing. It was founded on 29 April 1911 as Tsinghua College.^[1] Tsinghua's own account of its history describes a staged evolution: the university section was established in 1925, and the institution took the name National Tsing Hua University in 1928.^[6]

War and relocation

Tsinghua's official history records that in 1937 the university moved to Changsha, merging with National Peking University and Nankai University to form Lin-shih-ta-hsueh, or Changsha Temporary University.^[6] In 1938, after moving on to Kunming, it was renamed National South-West Associated University.^[6] In 1946 the university moved back to its original Beijing location after the war.^[6] These moves explain why the same institution appears under several different names in records of the period, and why part of Tsinghua's identity is attached to years when its campus was elsewhere.

Computing, from transistors to AI

Tsinghua's involvement in computing long predates the current wave of interest in machine learning. In 1966 researchers at the university were critical to China's shift from vacuum-tube to transistorised computers.^[1] That shift — replacing fragile, power-hungry vacuum tubes with transistors — is the change that made compact and reliable computers possible in general; the recorded fact is Tsinghua's part in the Chinese version of it.

Much of the university's current presence in artificial intelligence runs through particular people and institutes. Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, a Turing Award laureate in 2000, left Princeton in 2004 to become a professor at Tsinghua and has been dean of its Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS) since 2010.^[2] Tsinghua's AI institute page, meanwhile, dates the founding of IIIS to 2011.^[7] The institute is organised around cross-disciplinary work rather than a single traditional department, which is what its name signals.

Kaiming He, first author of the paper that introduced ResNet, earned his B.S. at Tsinghua in 2007.^[5] ResNet is a residual network architecture: its layers learn a correction added to their input rather than a complete transformation of it, an arrangement that made very deep networks trainable and became a standard building block for image recognition.

Companies and separate institutes have grown out of this research environment. Zhipu AI was founded in Beijing in 2019 by Jie Tang as a Tsinghua University spin-out; the first GLM model was introduced in a May 2022 paper, and GLM was developed by Zhipu AI together with Tsinghua's KEG group.^[3] GLM, a general-purpose language model, is the line of models the company has built since. The Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI), founded in 2020 and directed by Song-Chun Zhu, is affiliated with Tsinghua and Peking University.^[4]

Where it stands

In 2024 U.S. News & World Report ranked Tsinghua first in the world in nine subjects, including artificial intelligence and computer science.^[1] Rankings are only one measure of a university, but this one describes how Tsinghua is now positioned: not only as a teaching institution, but as a place where AI institutes, spin-out companies and individual researchers whose work is widely used are gathered.