Prof. Jing CAI, Head and Professor of the Department of Health Technology and Informatics at PolyU, secured funding of RMB200,000 from the “CAAI-Boson” Quantum Computing Application Innovation Fund in 2025 for his project titled “Ising Machine-based Training of First-Order TSK Fuzzy Systems with Applications”.

The Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence (CAAI) and Boson Quantum Technology are the funding bodies. Prof. Cai, together with six other Chinese Mainland scholars, was qualified to receive the funding last year, for their respective projects.

Prof. Cai’s project, under the Coherent Ising Machine (CIM) paradigm, reformulates the training process of first-order Takagi-Sugeno-Kang (TSK) fuzzy systems into Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimisation (QUBO) problems amenable to efficient CIM-based computation. Furthermore, the project undertakes a series of pattern recognition tasks, for example, classification and regression, for clinical applications on a CIM hardware platform and conducts a comprehensive evaluation of performance in terms of both accuracy and computational efficiency.