On July 6, the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) kicked off in Shanghai. In order to boost the growth of young scholars in the field of Artificial Intelligence, encourage innovative research, and advance the scientific and technological progress in the field of Artificial Intelligence, the conference carried out the selection of "WAIC young outstanding papers”. The paper "Simple and Deep Graph Convolutional Networks" by Wei Zhewei’s team from Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China, won the Nomination Award for the World Artificial Intelligence Conference Youth Outstanding Paper. The paper was published in ICML 2020, a top conference on machine learning. It was co-authored by students and faculty members from RUC, Huang Zengfeng from Fudan University, and Ding Bolin and Li Yaliang from Alibaba, with Professor Wei as the corresponding author and Chen Ming, a master student supervised by Wei, as the first author of the paper.

The World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) is an international high-end cooperation and exchange platform organized by the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Science and Technology and other departments. This year's WAIC Youth Paper Award calls for research results which have either resulted in significant outcomes in basic theory or applied research in intelligent science and technology and related fields, or have made remarkable achievements in key technology or applied technology innovation. The award only consider papers published in academic journals or academic conferences after January 1, 2020,

A total of 235 papers were received from home and abroad, including internationally renowned universities, research institutions and enterprises. The final evaluation meeting was held on June 6. Professor Pan Yunhe, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and director of the National New Generation Artificial Intelligence Strategy Advisory Committee, Dai Qionghai, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and chairman of the Chinese Society for Artificial Intelligence, Jiang Changjun, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and supervisor of the Chinese Society for Artificial Intelligence, among other distinguished Academicians and experts formed the committee to fulfill the final evaluation. After voting, the final evaluation committee finally selected 10 papers and 10 nomination papers for the "2023 World Conference on Artificial Intelligence Youth Outstanding Paper Award".

The award-winning paper "Simple and Deep Graph Convolutional Networks" was published at ICML 2020, a top machine learning conference. The paper proposed a deep graph convolutional model, GCNII, which extends the depth of graph convolutional networks and the ability to acquire higher-order information, thus improved the prediction performance of graph-related machine learning tasks, solved the problem of over-smoothing of graph convolutional networks, and theoretically proved the effectiveness of the algorithm. GCNII has long occupied the first place in the evaluation lists of PaperWithCode, an internationally renowned machine learning data website, and the prediction accuracy of GCNII on Cora and Pubmed datasets has always been the best since its introduction in 2020. According to Google Scholar website, the GCNII paper has 866 citations since it was published in July 2020, and the number of citations is ranked first among the papers in the field of graph neural networks in the last three years of ICML conferences.