Professor
Programme Director (Computer Science)
School of Engineering and Computer Science (SECS)
Associate Dean (Research)
Faculty of Engineering (FEng)
Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (CDSAI)
Victoria University of Wellington (VUW)

Evolutionary Computation for Combinatorial Optimisation Group (ECCO)
Evolutionary Computation and Machine Learning Research Group (ECRG)
IEEE CIS Taskforce on Evolutionary Scheduling and Combinatorial Optimisation (TESCO)

[PhD Vacancy]: I am looking for PhD/MSc/Honours/Summer Research students. If you have similar research interests with me, please do not hesitate to contact me.
中国国家留学基金委合作奖学金请点击这里.

NEWS

• [Research Excellence Award]: I am honoured to receive a VUW Research Excellence Award 2024.
• [Best Paper Award]: Xiaocheng Liao's paper "Learning Traffic Signal Control via Genetic Programming" won the GP track Best Paper Award of the ACM Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) 2024.
• [Best Paper Nomination]: Jiyuan Pei's paper "Learning from Offline and Online Experiences: A Hybrid Adaptive Operator Selection Framework" received the L4EC track Best Paper Nomination of the ACM Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) 2024.
• I am honoured to be recognised as an Outstanding Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 2024.
• [Best Paper Award]: Trevor Londt's paper "XC-NAS: A New Cellular Encoding Approach for Neural Architecture Search of Multi-path Convolutional Neural Networks" won the Best Student Paper Runner-Up Award of the Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2023.
• [Presentation Award]: Jordan MacLachlan won the VUW 3-minutes Thesis Presentation Award Second Prize 2023 ($1,000 NZD).
• [Humies Award]: Jordan MacLachlan's work on "Genetic Programming for Emergency Medical Services" won the GECCO Humies Silver Award 2023 ($2,000 USD).
• [Best Paper Award]: Zhixing Huang's paper "Grammar-guided linear genetic programming for dynamic job shop scheduling" won the GP track Best Paper Award of the ACM Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) 2023.
• [Best Paper Award]: Shaolin Wang's paper "Local Ranking Explanation for Genetic Programming Evolved Routing Policies for Uncertain Capacitated Arc Routing Problems" won the ECOM track Best Paper Award of the ACM Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) 2022.

Research Interests

• Evolutionary Computation and Learning
• Combinatorial Optimisation
• Genetic Programming
• Reinforcement Learning
• Large Language Models
• Automated Algorithm Design / Hyper-Heuristics
• Multi-objective Optimisation and Decision Making
• AI Planning and Scheduling
• Explainable AI

Biography

Dr. Yi Mei is a Professor and Associate Dean (Research) at the Faculty of Engineering, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand.

His research interests include evolutionary computation for combinatorial optimisation, genetic programming, automatic algorithm design, explainable AI, multi-objective optimisation, transfer/multitask learning and optimisation. He has published on top journals in EC and Operations Research (OR) such as IEEE TEVC, IEEE TCYB, EJOR, IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, and ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software. He won an IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation Outstanding Paper Award 2017, GECCO Best Paper Awards in 2022, 2023, 2024, and the EuroGP Best Paper Award 2022.

He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Computational Intelligence Magazine, IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, Journal of Scheduling, and an Editorial Board Member/Associate Editor of four other international journals. He serves as the Chair of IEEE CIS Evolutionary Computation Technical Committee and Education Portal Subcommittee. He was the Chair of the IEEE CIS Taskforce on Evolutionary Scheduling and Combinatorial Optimisation. He was the Chair of the IEEE CIS Travel Grant Subcommittee, a Vice-Chair of the IEEE CIS Emergent Technologies Technical Committee, a member of three IEEE CIS Task Forces and two IEEE CIS Technical Committees. He is recognised as Stanford University/Elsevier’s World’s Top 2% Scientist since 2021. He is a Fellow of Engineering New Zealand and an IEEE Senior Member.

Education

• PhD in Computer Science, University of Science and Technology of China, 2010
• MSc in Computer Science, University of Science and Technology of China, 2007
• BSc in Mathematics, University of Science and Technology of China, 2005