Nuo (second tone)

"You?"

Wang Hongfa froze for a moment, then his expression darkened.

From the look on his face, Wu Chen knew he suspected that Wu Chen had beaten him to publishing the SNN paper.

The old geezer was probably already thinking about how to write to the editorial office and demand a retraction, since he had also discovered many problems with the paper.

Wu Chen admired his bewilderment and confusion for a few seconds before speaking slowly.

"ICIP, Journal of Software, Chinese Journal of Computers-don't those count as top journals?"

With each name he mentioned, the others' eyes widened a little further.

Judging by their expressions, they clearly didn't believe him.

Wang Hongfa, too, went from initial alarm to confusion, and finally to sudden understanding.

"Let me make sure I heard you right. You're saying you recently published three papers in top journals?"

Wu Chen nodded. "Yeah."

"As first author?"

"Yes."

Wang Hongfa suddenly smiled, his worries gone.

The others laughed along with him.

Even Liu Ping, who was sitting next to Wang Hongfa, let out a snort of laughter.

"Heh, Old Wang, don't drive him crazy. Heh, haha, you've got the kid talking nonsense."

She finally managed to stifle her laughter and teased Wang Hongfa beside her.

The people around them only laughed harder when they heard that.

For a while, the conference room was filled with a lively atmosphere.

Of course, a few teachers who had remained neutral shook their heads and sighed.

They had all been through that stage themselves. Who hadn't had a breakdown or two?

When some people were working on their doctorates, they couldn't sleep at night without alcohol. Otherwise, they were sure to wake up with a start an hour later.

So someone like Wu Chen, who had gone so far off the deep end that he imagined publishing three papers in top journals at once, wasn't so bad. At worst, his head was muddled; it wasn't as if he was carrying a cleaver or anything. He could recover by leaving this circle.

Wang Hongfa also watched cheerfully as everyone made fun of Wu Chen.

Once things had quieted down a little, he sighed at Liu Ping in feigned regret.

"Young people these days really can't take the slightest pressure. Think about how it was in our day..."

The meeting was a waste of time to begin with, so Wang Hongfa seized the opportunity to talk at length about his own experiences as a lecturer back then.

How he had shocked the entire school by publishing in a top journal after just one year on the job, how some professor abroad had invited him to continue his studies, and so on.

Of course, in the end, he inevitably went on about how wonderful things were abroad.

After the merger with the School of Software, he, as dean, would take the lead in turning the School of Information Engineering into a domestic academic holy land, blah, blah, blah.

Once the meeting entered this kind of garbage time, everyone except Liu Ping and a few newcomers who had just started working listened attentively; the rest secretly took out their phones and slacked off.

Huang Ruijie was also a newcomer who had joined this year.

However, he had graduated from the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) in the Ugly Country. His advisor was Jure Leskovec, an authoritative professor in the field of big data, and he had managed to get a second-author credit on a TKDE ("IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering") paper.

After grinding away for more than three years, he successfully graduated once he had published a first-author paper in "SIGKDD Explorations."

He eventually returned to China and joined Xiaoheshan University of Technology as a lecturer.

But he was better at dealing with people than Wu Chen.

Not only had he shown Wang Hongfa concern when he was sick, but he had also introduced him to his advisor.

As a result, he not only had a light teaching load of just six classes a week, but had also secured a pretty good vertically funded research project.

If he completed it, he could receive the school's category-three Young Talent award.

It came with not only 150,000 yuan in research funding, but also priority when applying for temporary university housing and a direct promotion to associate professor!

After scrolling through the news for a few minutes, Huang Ruijie opened the Chinese Journal of Computers' official website.

Although he also thought Wu Chen had just been talking nonsense, his aspiration was pretty good.

He also wanted to publish a first-author paper in the Chinese Journal of Computers!

So he planned to look at the latest trends there, then find a paper to tinker with.

If he could luck into a Zone 2 or Zone 3 publication, that would be pretty good too. At least he would make some progress on his research requirements.

After scrolling through the latest table of contents, he spotted a newly published article.

"A word vector modeling method based on contextual distribution features."

Interesting. I've been having some trouble with user behavior sequence analysis lately. This feels like it should help.

So Huang Ruijie clicked on it and, out of habit, looked at the author first.

chen.wu, zjut, College of Information Engineering.

Wu Chen, Xiaoheshan University of Technology, School of Information Engineering.

Huh?

Huang Ruijie was dumbfounded. Then he widened his eyes and checked carefully.

Name ✓

Institution ✓

Research area ✓

Publication date ✓

Wait, what?

It really was fucking Wu Chen?!

Huang Ruijie spun around and looked at Wu Chen, who was sitting diagonally behind him.

At that moment, Wu Chen was paying no attention to anyone else. His head was lowered as he wrote and scribbled on a piece of paper, completely unaffected by the emotions of the people around him.

Sensing Huang Ruijie's gaze, he looked up and gave him a slightly puzzled look.

Huang Ruijie quickly turned back around and took a deep breath.

But his movement had been too conspicuous, and it caught the attention of Yin Hao, another new lecturer sitting beside him.

"Brother Huang, what's wrong?"

Yin Hao asked quietly.

"I..."

Huang Ruijie felt as though his brain had turned to mush, and he didn't know how to explain it clearly, so he handed over his phone.

"See for yourself."

"Oh."

Yin Hao took the phone. At first, when he saw the dense mass of text, he thought it was a novel.

But when he saw what it was, along with Wu Chen's name and institution, he froze too.

Then he also spun around and looked at Wu Chen.

His movement was even wilder than Huang Ruijie's had been.

As a result, he accidentally knocked over a cup on the table, soaking the scratch paper covered in circles in front of him.

"What's going on with you two?"

After making such a commotion, they had finally incurred Wang Hongfa's displeasure.

During a meeting, a leader could go off topic, crack jokes, and slack off as much as he liked.

But how dare a small fry do it?

Yin Hao was startled by Wang Hongfa's tone.

He hurriedly stood up and stammered, "Dean Wang, I-I'm sorry, I... saw Wu Chen's paper!"

"What paper?"

Wang Hongfa was puzzled.

"The one Teacher Wu... Wu published in the Chinese Journal of Computers."

Yin Hao hurriedly explained.

"Chinese Journal of Computers?"

Wang Hongfa was even more confused. "Where?"

Yin Hao quickly picked up the phone and turned to ask Huang Ruijie with his eyes whether he could show it to Wang Hongfa.

At a time like this, Huang Ruijie naturally couldn't refuse, and he no longer cared if anyone discovered his browser history.

Right now, he was just thankful that when everyone had been laughing at Wu Chen, he hadn't laughed the loudest.

Only the second loudest. Wu Chen probably wouldn't mind, right...

After taking the phone, Wang Hongfa stood there and began to read.

The conference room fell silent once again.

Only this time, the air was thick with the portent of an approaching storm.

But Wang Hongfa could no longer concern himself with that.

He didn't take in the actual contents of the paper at all.

He stared at Wu Chen's name for a long time, then opened the browser's address bar with trembling hands.

Ignoring the search history entries for things like black stockings and beautiful legs, and campus springtime scenes, he entered the Journal of Software's website.

He found the publication index.

"An efficient word vector training algorithm based on hierarchical Softmax," Wu Chen, Xiaoheshan University of Technology.

Then he opened ICIP's official website.

"Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space," chen.wu, zjut.

It was actually true!

Three first-author papers in top journals!

A few seconds later.

Wang Hongfa suddenly felt a buzzing in his head and his blood surged upward. Then everything went black before his eyes, and his body went limp.

"Old Wang!"

Liu Ping cried out in alarm and hurriedly caught him.

Wang Hongfa leaned against her, gasping for breath, and only with great difficulty did he manage to grab the edge of the table and steady himself.

He raised his head, his scarlet eyes fixed on Wu Chen.

And at that moment, Wu Chen had just looked up as well.

In truth, he had no need to prove anything to the people in this conference room.

Whether they believed him or not, the facts remained the same.

But seeing Wang Hongfa's reaction, he still felt a little more cheerful.

So he spoke calmly.

He wanted to say something, but in the end, he uttered only one syllable.

"Nuo." (Second tone.)

It was an expression in a Jiangsu-Zhejiang dialect, and Wang Hongfa could understand it.

Translated into Mandarin, it meant:

I told you so long ago, but you just wouldn't believe me.