Tsinghua University
- Chinese name
- 清华大学
- Pinyin
- Unified Social Credit Code
12100000400000624D- Website
- 1676317545
Tsinghua University (清华大学) is the home institution of Hua Zhibing (华智冰), China’s first original virtual student, who “enrolled” in June 2021 — jointly created by the Tsinghua computer science department with the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, Zhipu AI and Xiaoice, all three of them Tsinghua-orbit organisations. Hua Zhibing writes poetry, paints and composes, was framed from the start around continuous learning, and her launch video on the university’s own Bilibili channel drew close to eight hundred thousand views; the project put a face on the GLM-era large-model work of the same department that produced Zhipu.
The university’s digital-human footprint runs wider than one virtual student. Its Interactive Media Research Institute (交互媒体研究所) demonstrated VR large-space and naked-eye 3D digital-human experiences for cultural tourism at a 2026 expo; its Metaverse Culture Laboratory (元宇宙文化实验室) co-formed a metaverse joint laboratory in Shandong; and Tsinghua museum explainers took part in a digital-docent training initiative. Its joint “digital humanities” research centre with Tongfang CNKI (清华大学-同方知网数字人文联合研究中心) is a separate matter — 数字人文 is digital humanities scholarship, not digital humans — and is noted here only to keep the two apart.