Computational Intelligence - February 2014 - 13

Career
Profile

by CIM Editorial Office

A tête-à-tête with Professor Xin Yao,
President of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS),
2014-2015

Background

rof. Yao, a Professor of Computer
Science at the University of Birmingham, UK, whose works have
won numerous awards, has served in
various executive positions in IEEE
CIS and other organizations for many
years. Growing up in Fuzhou, Fujian
Province in Southeast China, Prof. Yao
moved to Hefei in 1978 to attend university then to Beijing in 1982 for his
Masters before returning to Hefei in
1985 to pursue his PhD. In 1990, a few
months after his PhD thesis was submitted, Prof. Yao accepted a postdoctoral fellowship in Australia. In 1999,
Prof. Yao, together with his wife and
their son moved to UK where he is
currently based and especially enjoys
teaching "Introduction to Evolutionary
Computation" and "Introduction to
Natural Computation".

Mentors

of the algorithms developed within
Prof. Yao's PhD paper is genetic annealing-a hybrid algorithm of genetic
algorithms and simulated annealing that
was presented at the 2nd Australian
Conference on Neural Networks in
Sydney, February 1991.
As a Professor of Computer Science
at the University of Birmingham, UK,
Prof. Xin Yao has been an ardent supporter and volunteer of CIS, even
before the society became a formal
organization! Prof. Yao's enthusiasm
and passion for CI is evident from the
many CIS activities that he has been
involved in for many years-as a
reviewer for conferences and journals,
as a member of technical committees
and task forces, as conferences' organizers, editors of journals, etc. Prof. Yao
believes that it is his active participation
in CIS activities and the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation
since its inception in 1994 that has

enabled him to increase his scientific
knowledge while honing his research
skills and personal awareness.
Focus on Members

Prof. Yao considers CIS members as
the society's greatest strength, where
members present a wealth of technical
expertise and innovative application
experiences to challenging real-world
problems. "Our members are passionate
about their work and their volunteering.
They are thought leaders of the world in
their own areas. They have helped to develop
and grow CI in such profound ways that
few of us could appreciate fully. For example, how many of us know that evolutionary
computation played a crucial role in the
design of the 2008 Beijing Olympics stadium (affectionately known as the Bird's
Nest and Water Cube)? CIS should take
the lead in collecting and sharing such experiences among its members and the wider
communities," Prof. Yao enthuses.

Recounting his younger days in the CI
field, Prof. Yao cited Professor Guoliang
Chen from the University of Science
and Technology of China (USTC) and
Professor Guojie Li from the Chinese
Academy of Sciences as instrumental
mentors in furthering his passion in CI.
Spending his PhD time in Beijing
working with Prof. Li in combinatorial
search and with Prof. Chen in parallel
algorithms and neural networks at
USTC, Prof. Yao presented his PhD
research on simulated annealing. One
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCI.2013.2291961
Date of publication: 14 January 2014

Prof. Xin Yao attending a session at the 14th International Conference on Intelligent Data
Engineering and Automated Learning (IDEAL'2013), Hefei, Anhui, China, 20-23 October 2013.

February 2014 | Ieee ComputatIonal IntellIgenCe magazIne

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Computational Intelligence - February 2014