Recovering rural memories

China's young students go to the countryside to improve lives as part of the sanxiaxiang program.

A grandmother was staring at a recovered photograph of her and her late husband for a long time as if in a trance after Zhang Wenhan helped her improve the quality of the aged photo using artificial intelligence (AI) technology. This is the scene that Zhang, a 19-year-old college student from Southwest China's Chongqing, cannot forget during his social practice in a local village this summer.

"The real death is that no one in the world remembers you," Zhang said, citing a famous quote from Pixar Animation Studios' Coco. "I could tell from the granny's eyes that it prolonged her memory of those good old days. And I believe the offspring of the figure in that photo could relate that there was once a family member who had lived and left traces."

This summer vacation, a group of students from the College of Artificial Intelligence at Southwest University took part in a public welfare activity to spread understanding of science and technology in rural areas and to offer their support to China's rural vitalization. And Zhang, majoring in intelligent science and technology at the college, was one of the group members involved in the effort.