We are delighted to announce that Prof. CHENG Ran, Associate Professor in the Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, has been awarded the 2025 IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) Outstanding Early Career Award. The award was presented at the 2025 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC), recently held in Hangzhou, China.
Established in 2010, the IEEE CIS Outstanding Early Career Award honors a single individual each year, under the age of 40, who has made outstanding contributions to the field of computational intelligence. Prof. CHENG is an active researcher in the field of Evolutionary Computation (EC), with a research focus on complex system optimization and the development of autonomous adaptation mechanisms in intelligent agents. His work aims to endow AI systems with the ability to continuously evolve and improve themselves from a mechanistic perspective. He is the founder of EvoX, a modern open-source platform that combines the fundamental principles of natural evolution with the power of GPU-accelerated computing, establishing a robust computational foundation for the field.
To date, Prof. CHENG has published over 130 peer-reviewed papers, with more than 16,000 citations on Google Scholar. His research has garnered widespread international recognition, including the Best Paper Award at ACM GECCO 2024, the IEEE TEVC Outstanding Paper Award (2018, 2021), the IEEE CIM Outstanding Paper Award (2020), and the IEEE CIS Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award (2019). He has been named a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher (2023, 2024) and is listed among the world’s top 2% scientists by Stanford University (2020–2024).
Prof. CHENG founded the IEEE CIS Shenzhen Chapter and served as its inaugural Chair. He currently serves as Associate Editor for several prestigious journals, such as ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization (TELO), IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation (TEVC), and IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (TAI).
