On June 15, Chair Professor Xin YAO from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) was awarded the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Frank Rosenblatt Award for 2020. Chair Professor Xin YAO is the first Chinese scholar to win this award.

Xin Yao’s accomplishments in advancing evolutionary computation and machine learning are making it easier to solve complex optimization problems by impacting both the foundational and practical aspects of computational intelligence. His approaches to fast evolutionary programming have been applied to neural network structure learning, optimal routing, digital filter design, and design of new materials. His work on stochastic ranking has had a significant impact on solving constraint optimization problems in the areas of electrical, chemical, mechanical, and aeronautical engineering, biology, and economics.

The IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award is a Technical Field Award that was established in 2004. The award is presented for outstanding contributions to the advancement of the design, practice, techniques, or theory in biologically and linguistically motivated computational paradigms. These include neural networks, connectionist systems, evolutionary computation, fuzzy systems, and the hybrid intelligent systems in which these paradigms are contained.

Chair Professor Xin YAO is a leading scholar in artificial intelligence. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a former chairman of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. From 2003 to 2008, he served as editor in chief of IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation. To date, he has published more than 800 papers in high-impact academic journals and at leading conferences. His papers have been cited more than 49,000 times with an H-index of 99. He has previously won the IEEE Donald G. Fink Paper Award and the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks Outstanding Paper Award.