Keynote Plenary

Previous work on evolving neural networks has focused on single neural networks. However, monolithic neural networks are too complex to train and evolve for large and complex problems. It is often better to design a collection of simpler neural networks that work cooperatively to solve a large and complex problem. The key issue here is how to design such a collection automatically so that it has the best generalisation. This talk introduces work on evolving neural network ensembles, negative correlation learning, and multi-objective approaches to ensemble learning. The links among different learning algorithms are discussed. Online/incremental learning using ensembles will also be presented briefly.

Xin Yao is a Professor (Chair) of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, UK. He obtained his BSc from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei, China, in 1982, MSc from the North China Institute of Computing Technology in Beijing, China, in 1985, and PhD from USTC in Hefei, China, in 1990.

He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra in 1990-91 and at CSIRO Division of Building, Construction and Engineering in Melbourne in 1991-92. He was a lecturer, senior lecturer and an associate professor at the University College, the University of New South Wales (UNSW), the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) in Canberra in 1992-99. Attracted by the English weather, he moved to Birmingham on the April's Fool day in 1999 to take up a Chair of Computer Science.

Currently he is the Director of CERCIA (the Centre of Excellence for Research in Computational Intelligence and Applications, http://www.cercia.ac.uk) at the University of Birmingham, UK, which is specialised in applied research and knowledge transfer. He is an IEEE Fellow and a Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. He won the 2001 IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award and several other best paper awards. He was a Cheung Kong Scholar (Changjian Chair Professor) of the Ministry of Education of China, a Distinguished Visiting Professor (Grand Master Chair Professorship) of USTC in Hefei, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Yuan Ze University, Taiwan. In his spare time, he did the voluntary work as the Editor-in-Chief (2003-08) of IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, and is an associate editor or editorial board member of 12 international journals, and the editor of the World Scientific book series on "Advances in Natural Computation". He has been invited to give more than 50 keynote/plenary speeches at international conferences in many countries.

His major research interests include evolutionary computation and neural network ensembles. He has more than 300 refereed publications in journals and conferences. His work has been supported by AWM, EPSRC, EU, Royal Society, Chinese Academy of Sciences, NSFC, Honda, Marconi, BT, Thales and Severn Trent Water.