Awards and Honors


  1. Many invited keynote and plenary speeches.

  2. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks Outstanding 2009 Paper Award (bestowed in 2011) for the following paper:

  3. The second prize of the 2010 BT Gordon Radley Award for Best Author of Innovation for the paper (announced on 5 July 2010):

  4. 2 November 2010: Distinguished "Leon the Mathematician" Lecturer, Department of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.

  5. 2010 (Inaugural) University Award for Excellence in Doctoral Research Supervision, University of Birmingham, UK. (Announced in June 2010) Some of the recent achievements by my PhD students:

  6. Best Paper Award in the Theory track at the 2009 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, 8-12 July 2009, Montreal, Canada:

  7. The Best PhD Student Paper Prize at the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Software Testing Verification and Validation Workshop (ICSTW'08), 9-11 April 2008. Lillehammer, Norway, for the following paper:

  8. Sterling Hou Lecture, University of Missouri - Columbia, Columbia, MO 65211, USA, 28 October 2005.

  9. IEEE CIS Distinguished Lecture, University of Missouri - Rolla, Rolla, Missouri 65409, USA, 26 October 2005.

  10. IEEE CIS Distinguished Lecture, University of Missouri - St. Louis, St. Louis, MO 63121-4400, USA, 24 October 2005.

  11. Cheung Kong Scholar (Changjiang Chair Professorship), Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China.

  12. Distinguished Visiting Professor (Grand Master Chair Professorship), University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230027, P. R. China.

  13. Chief Professor of the School of Software Engineering, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230027, P. R. China.

  14. Visiting Professor, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, P. R. China.
    Title conferment (photo 1), Title conferment (photo 2).
    First of the three lectures given in September 2002.

  15. Visiting Professor, Xidian University, Xi'an, P. R. China.

  16. Visiting Professor, Northeast Normal University, Changchun, P. R. China.

  17. The 2001 IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award:
    Author: X. Yao.
    Title: "Evolving artificial neural networks," Proceedings of the IEEE, 87(9):1423-1447, September 1999.

  18. First Prize of the 1997 IEEE ACT Section Undergraduate Student Paper Contest:
    Authors: J. Leeming (student) and X. Yao (supervisor).
    Title: Terrain traversal by genetic algorithms.

  19. Third Prize of the 1997 IEEE ACT Section Postgraduate Student Paper Contest:
    Authors: Y. Liu (student) and X. Yao (supervisor). Title: Towards Designing Neural Network Ensembles by Evolution

  20. Best Student Paper Award (First Prize) at the 1996 IEEE International Conference on Evolutionary Computation (ICEC'96), Nagoya, Japan:
    Authors: P. J. Darwen (student) and X. Yao (supervisor). Title: Automatic modularization by speciation

  21. Best Student Paper Award (First Prize) at the 1995 IEEE International Conference on Evolutionary Computation (ICEC'95), Perth, Australia:
    Authors: P. J. Darwen (student) and X. Yao (supervisor).
    Title: A dilemma for fitness sharing with a scaling function

  22. The President's Award of the Chinese Academy of Sciences for Outstanding Thesis (November 1989).

  23. The Outstanding Player in the National Men's Basketball Competition for Postgraduate Students (August 1988, Dalian, P. R. China).

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