Prof Mengjie Zhang of Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

 Since the 1990s, evolutionary computation techniques have been widely used to solve machine learning tasks. In this talk, I will firstly provide a brief overview of machine learning and evolutionary computation, then provide a narrow view and a broad view of evolutionary machine learning.  After discussing the state-of-the-art research and applications of the main paradigms of evolutionary machine learning and their success in classification, feature selection, regression, clustering, computer vision and image analysis, scheduling and combinatorial optimisation, and evolutionary deep learning, the main challenges and lessons will be discussed. If time allows, I will provide an overview of our recent developments and discuss potential opportunities.  

Biography:

Mengjie Zhang is a Fellow of Royal Society of New Zealand, a Fellow of Engineering New Zealand, a Fellow of IEEE, an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, currently Professor of Computer Science at Victoria University of Wellington, where he heads the interdisciplinary Evolutionary Computation and Machine Learning Research Group. He is also the founding Director of the Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University.

His research is mainly focused on AI, machine learning and big data, particularly in evolutionary learning and optimisation, feature selection/construction and big dimensionality reduction, computer vision and image analysis, scheduling and combinatorial optimisation, classification with unbalanced data and missing data, and evolutionary deep learning and transfer learning. Prof Zhang has published over 800 research papers in refereed international journals and conferences. He has been serving as an associated editor for over ten international journals including IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, the Evolutionary Computation Journal (MIT Press), and involving major AI and EC conferences as a chair. He received the “EvoStar/SPECIES Award for Outstanding Contribution to Evolutionary Computation in Europe” in 2023. Since 2007, he has been listed as a top five (currently No. 4) world genetic programming researchers by the GP bibliography (http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~wbl/biblio/gp-html/index.html).

Prof Zhang is a past Chair of the IEEE CIS Intelligent Systems Applications Technical Committee, the IEEE CIS Emergent Technologies Technical Committee and the IEEE CIS Evolutionary Computation Technical Committee, a vice-chair of the IEEE CIS Task Force on Evolutionary Feature Selection and Construction, a vice-chair of the IEEE CIS Task Force on Evolutionary Computer Vision and Image Processing, and the founding chair of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Chapter in New Zealand.

Address:Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, , Wellington, New Zealand