Short Biography
Chao Qian is a Professor in the School of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University, China. He received the BSc and PhD degrees in the Department of Computer Science and Technology from Nanjing University. After finishing his PhD in 2015, he became an Associate Researcher in the School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, until 2019, when he returned to Nanjing University as an Associate Professor. In 2024, he became a Full Professor.
His research interests include artificial intelligence, evolutionary computation, and machine learning. He mainly focuses on building the theoretical foundation of evolutionary learning, and application to solve complex black-box optimization problems in science and industry. He has published one book “Evolutionary Learning: Advances in Theories and Algorithms”, and over 70 first/corresponding-authored papers in top-tier AI-related journals (AIJ, ECJ, TEvC, Algorithmica, TCS) and conferences (AAAI, IJCAI, ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR). He has won the ACM GECCO 2011 Best Theory Paper Award, the IDEAL 2016 Best Paper Award, and the IEEE CEC 2021 Best Student Paper Award Nomination. His work on AI for geoscience has been published at the premier journal PNAS, and his works on chip placement have won the DATE’25 (one leading international conference on EDA) Best Paper Award and the 21st ACM SIGEVO Humies Bronze Award. He has successfully developed algorithms to solve complex optimization problems (e.g., supply chain optimization, wireless network optimization, chip placement, chip register optimization, and optical lens attitude correction) in Huawei, and won Huawei Spark Award three times.
He serves on the editorial board of Artificial Intelligence Journal, Evolutionary Computation Journal, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, etc. He is the founding chair of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) Task Force on Evolutionary Learning, and was also the chair of IEEE CIS Task Force on Theoretical Foundations of Bio-inspired Computation. He has regularly given tutorials and co-chaired special sessions at CEC, GECCO and PPSN, given an Early Career Spotlight Talk at IJCAI 2022, and will give a keynote talk at the 16th Spanish Congress on Metaheuristics, Evolutionary and Bioinspired Algorithms (MAEB 2025). He will also be a Program Co-Chair of PRICAI 2025. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation for Excellent Young Scholars (2020) and CCF-IEEE CS Young Computer Scientist Award (2023), and has hosted a National Science and Technology Major Project.