On the evening of October 9, 2024, at 19:00 in the A431 Lecture Hall of the School of Civil and Transportation Engineering at Shenzhen University, our dean, Academician Chen Xiangsheng of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, gave a report titled "Leading the Development Direction of Civil Engineering - Digital Civil Engineering" to all 2024 undergraduate students in the college. More than 200 teachers and students, including Vice Dean Yang Lei, representatives of young teachers, and 2024 freshmen, attended the lecture, which was chaired by Vice Dean Yang Lei.

Academician Chen Xiangsheng's report mainly contains six parts, namely, "engineering, knowledge and engineering knowledge", "progress in infrastructure in mainland China", "enlightenment or lesson from the history of human civilization to mankind - civil engineering to take a warning", "the Belt and Road - China's contribution to the community of human destiny", "beauty of great civil engineering - representative of ancient architecture", "great civil engineering reform - digital and intelligent empowerment of civil engineering in mainland China".

The report starts from the origin of civil engineering, comprehensively reviews the development history of civil engineering, and introduces the three leaps in the development history of civil engineering in the past few thousand years. Starting from representative ancient architecture and combining it with the great achievements of civil engineering in the modern world, especially in recent years in China, we led students to fully appreciate the beauty of large-scale civil engineering in just a few minutes.

Academician Chen, in light of the unprecedented changes facing the world today, introduced China's comprehensive implementation of the ecological environment strategy and the country's integration of carbon peak and carbon neutrality into the overall layout of ecological civilization construction. He clarified that civil engineering should follow natural laws and promote the construction of a community with a shared future for mankind.

Finally, Academician Chen Xiangsheng pointed out that traditional civil engineering is undergoing its fourth leap, which is the cross-border empowerment of "digitalization+artificial intelligence+various perceptions+related disciplines", and will form a new generation of civil engineering with flesh and blood, perception, warning, and immunity - digital civil engineering.

The lecture ended successfully with warm applause from the entire audience.