Erik Robert Nilsson, senior journalist of China Daily, speaks during the Beijing International Youth Innovation and Development Forum in Beijing on Friday. [WANG ZHUANGFEI/CHINA DAILY]

The Beijing International Youth Innovation and Development Forum, held on Friday in Beijing, attracted more than 260 young scholars from diverse backgrounds with the aim of building a platform for young talent to share innovation experience and achievements.

Zhong Yutong, host of Youth Talk, the last agenda item of the forum, invited five youth representatives from various industries around the globe to share their stories and experiences on the topic of responsibility and accountability of youth in the new era of innovation. Erik Robert Nilsson, Lin Yuanqing, Li Xiang, Yang Fan and Andey Ng delivered their speeches.

Erik Robert Nilsson, senior journalist of China Daily, member of the Edgar Snow Newsroom and the youngest-ever winner of the China Friendship Award in 2016, attached great importance to international and intercultural exchanges among the youth.

He was committed to actively interpreting China's policies and aspirations to help the world better understand China. His latest book Closer to Heaven: A global nomad's journey through China's poverty alleviation recorded China's miracle of poverty alleviation achievements on the basis of his grassroots experience, and his videos have been viewed hundreds of millions of times among young people on social media. "China truly is a land of opportunity where the unimaginable can become reality," he said.

Lin Yuanqing is the founder and CEO of Aibee, a unicorn company and a pioneer in promoting the "Offline Online One-World" concept in China.

Lin said that Aibee's technology is capable of constructing a 100,000 square meter 3D shopping center in a mere one to two days in comparison to traditional approaches, in which a months-long process is required. In this way, Aibee has become the first in the market to fully digitize offline spaces while significantly improving efficiency and decreasing the cost of digitization.

"Aibee is committed to contributing to the innovative potential of young talent, to empowering and upgrading vertical industries with cutting-edge AI technology, and to ushering in a new era of an AI-powered physical world," he said.

Li Xiang, founder and CEO of Coyote Bioscience, imparted her ambition and progression of entrepreneurship in her speech. Over the past decade, Li and her team strove in the molecular diagnostics area and set up Coyote Bioscience. She led her team to successfully develop "Flash Detect" platform, the fastest and most sensitive PCR testing platform approved during the COVID-19 epidemic period.

"The needs of the nation are my aspirations," Yang Fan, co-founder of Providence Academy, said in his speech. Since its founding in 2019, Providence Academy has provided full scholarships to all its members and opportunities of academic exchanges with over a hundred experts and scholars from various fields.

Yang positioned Providence Academy as a mobile college for global youth that aimed to help China's high-quality development and modernization through an international talent pool of young people.

Andey Ng, a Yenching scholar at Peking University, is engaged in research on technology's socioeconomic impact on people. During work uncovering common behaviors for the young generation, she found that tab switching has become a repetitive task as young people used laptops for almost everything, which sparked her interest in Human-Computer Interaction and Adaptive User Interfaces.