According to the MOU, both parties will carry out all-round strategic cooperation in the construction of innovation platform, recruitment of high-end talents, international cooperation and exchange, etc to support the strategic social and economic development of Yinzhou district.

Based on the establishment of the Key Laboratory for Digital Port Technologies, the university will take full advantage of its international talent pool, and experience in the research and knowledge exchange, further the talent recruitment on the field of port digital twin, 5G technology and artificial intelligence and introduce more innovative and entrepreneurial projects to Yinzhou.

Professor Ruibin Bai has a research focus on the computational intelligence, reinforcement learning, operations research, evolutionary algorithm, hyper-heuristics, modelling, scheduling and optimisation with a special focus on transportation systems and healthcare. He is the Director of the Intelligent Simulation and Digital Port Lab, supervising a team of students and software engineers that has successfully tackled a challenging truck dispatching problem in Ningbo-Zhoushan Port, achieved improvements in the efficiency of port operations by developing cutting-edge technologies to innovate their current operations and business and has reduced the operations significantly.

Ningbo-Zhoushan Port is the signature site of Zhejiang and even the Yangtze River Delta since it is the largest port in the world by tonnage. Its sustainable development is vital to the economic growth of the area.

In the beginning of 2022, two academic members from the Digital Port Lab, Dr Sean He and Dr Yuan Yao have been recognised and selected for the Yongjiang Talent Programme.