The news of Mr Shi's recognition triggered a heated debate in academiccircles, China Youth Daily notes in an article republished by Xinhua news agency.
He is structuring programs that are relevant beyond academiccircles and promote a kind of research that serves the human person in his or her community.
The two well-respected economists created a minor stir in academiccircles a few years back when they published "A Theory of Prostitution" in the Journal of Political Economy.
To take one much-quoted example, Charles Clarke caused a stir in academiccircles when he was education secretary by saying education for its own sake was "a bit dodgy".
The man behind the technology is Immerz CEO and president Shahriar Afshar, a physics researcher infamous in academiccircles for a controversial experiment he conducted on Harvard in quantum mechanics.
But it was a very important point, because there was a lot of debate in government circles and in academiccircles about whether these different groups do in fact cooperate across these philosophical lines.
Eugenics, the pseudo-science of racial pecking orders, was so much the rage in academiccircles from the late 19th century through the 1930s that even a towering liberal figure like Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes believed in it.
Yet its rapid uptake since 1994, when access to the Internet first spread beyond China's elite academic and scientific circles, suggests demand will be huge.