Shanghai University
- Chinese name
- 上海大学
- Pinyin
- Unified Social Credit Code
1231000042502637XEregistered in Shanghai 上海- Website
Shanghai University (上海大学) is the municipal comprehensive university of Shanghai and a demand-side adopter of digital human technology across dialect preservation, publicity and teaching. Its Shanghai-dialect AI persona Xiaohu (小沪), developed by the College of Liberal Arts Chinese-studies team with a cartoon digital human image designed by Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts professor He Jingjing (何晶晶), debuted at the sixth China Digital Humanities annual conference in November 2024 as a component of the city’s Fanhua (繁花) large model, integrating speech recognition, LLM text generation and speech synthesis on the corpus of dialectologist Qian Nairong (钱乃荣); the launch drew coverage from the Shanghai municipal government information office and a dedicated Baidu Baike entry. The university’s first AIGC promotional film, released in June 2024, features a digital human of its own president Liu Changsheng (刘昌胜). On the procurement side it has tendered digital human systems repeatedly: an intelligent virtual digital human experimental teaching platform awarded to SenseTime for 470,000 yuan in 2025, and a 3D custom digital human interaction system awarded for 690,000 yuan in December 2024 via the government procurement network. In April 2026 it jointly inaugurated Shanghai’s first AI science and technology innovation learning center, where students of its affiliated high school built the meditation-oriented digital human Mu Xin Meditation (沐心·冥想).
Its Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts (上海大学上海美术学院) runs an artistic digital-thinking joint laboratory with Vector Emergence (向量涌现, FuturX AI), which built two “digital thinking” avatars: “AI Chen Jialing”, from the thought of the New Haipai ink painter Chen Jialing, and “AI Professor Jin”, from the academy’s executive dean Jin Jiangbo. The two sides signed a strategic cooperation agreement at the 2026 World Design Capital Conference, where both avatars were opened to public interaction for the first time.