Welcome from the President

CIS – The Professional Home

Happy New Year, Fellow CIS-ers!

I am deeply honored to serve as the President of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) for 2024-2025. I could not even imagine that I would become the President of our Society when I joined IEEE at the 1998 World Congress on Computational Intelligence. I would take this opportunity to thank our predecessors, in particular Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier and Jim Keller for their trust, guidance and support.

Our Society, formerly the IEEE Neural Network Council, is the only Society within the IEEE that dedicates itself to computational Intelligence (CI), basically another name of artificial intelligence (AI). CIS has maintained stability through the difficult times of AI and have achieved a healthy growth in the past years, mainly due to the dedicated and enthusiastic leadership of the Executive Committee of the society, including the President, the past president or president-elect, and the seven Vice presidents, and all our members and volunteers.

CIS presidents

Photo of Pablo A Estevez, CIS President 2016-2017 (left), Jim Keller, CIS President 2022-2023 (center) and Yaochu Jin, CIS President 2024-2025 (right) at IEEE CAI 2023 in Santa Clara, California

In the years to come, we have both challenges and opportunities. CI/AI techniques have undergone many breakthroughs in recent years, making an increasingly significant impact on almost all areas of science, technology, and the human society. On the contrary, our world has become much uncertain and polarized compared to twenty years ago, and some CI/AI techniques such as generative models are so powerful that they have caused growing concerns. How to grasp the opportunities while handling uncertainty in such a dynamic and multi-objective environment? As the new President of the Society in the coming two years, I have the following missions to achieve:

First, we must consolidate the strong position of CIS in the research community. Our society currently has over eight thousand members, and we will do everything to let them feel at home with our Society in their research life. To achieve this, we need to provide richer services to, and communicate more transparently with our members. We will stick to our core values of diversity, equity and inclusive. The Society is proud of the high reputation of our flagship journals, including the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems, and IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, and we must work hard to maintain the top quality of the papers published in our journals. To this end, we have already decided to introduce the double-anonymous peer review process to make sure that the review of all papers submitted to our journals is fair, rigorous and yet constructive. Out of the same reason, we will limit the paper acceptance rate of our main conferences, including International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, IEEE Conferences on Fuzzy Systems, and IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation. Since the Society’s smooth operation relies mainly on the volunteer service of our members, it is also important to recognize their contributions.

Second, we make every effort to identify new growth opportunities. Vast opportunities for growing the society can be explored. Presently, researchers from many regions such as mid-Africa, South Asia and South America remain underrepresented in the society. Preliminary attempts have been made, owing to great efforts of our colleagues working on the Breaking Boundaries initiative. At the IEEE AFRICOM 2023 held in September in Nairobi, Kenia, Anna Wilbik and I myself organized an IEEE CIS Awareness Session, presenting the structure of the society and the service it offers, including webinars, distinguish lecture program and mentoring programs. We will also explore possible collaborations with reginal and local professional organizations closely related to our society to involve more researchers, in particular junior researchers. In addition, we will try to attract researchers from related research areas such as computational neural science, brain science, and artificial life to promote interdisciplinary research and diversify the society.

Finally, we work together on shaping the future. We will continue to engage ourselves in shaping the future, not only the future of our Society, but also the future of the entire human society. Apart from our technical leadership in CI/AI, we will seek to create larger economical and societal impact by working more closely with industry and government. The society has recently established a Vice President for Industry and Government Activities, demonstrating that we put a lot of values on promoting applications of CI/AI techniques, and we will continue to do so in the future. We must also continue our focus on education and outreach, inspiring the next generation of computational intelligence researchers and practitioners. We will expand our mentorship programs and provide richer resources to support students and early-career professionals across the world. Finally, we will take more social responsibility by nurturing and advancing green, accountable and trustworthy CI/AI techniques. The society has most recently set up a new Technical Committee on Ethical, Legal, Social, Environmental and Human Dimensions of AI/CI (SHIELD). And we CIS-ers are also particularly skilled at developing bio-inspired intelligence techniques, which may lead to more energy-efficient and scalable artificial general intelligence models compared to the current dominating large language models.

To achieve the above missions, we need the help of our CIS members. Strong and continuous support from all our members, including readers who are not yet our members, is vital for the Society. Together, we have the potential to drive positive changes in the world through the advancement of CI/AI. By fostering collaborations, embracing new opportunities, and nurturing the talents of future leaders, we will shape a brighter future for CIS and the entire human society, despite the unprecedented uncertainty we are facing.

I look forward to working with you to accomplish the above missions. I strongly encourage you all to take some time to explore http://cis.ieee.org and see CIS as the home of your professional life. Do not hesitate to contact me at jinyaochu@westlake.edu.cn for any thoughts, questions and suggestions.

Wish you a happy, healthy and prosperous 2024!

 Yaochu Jin

Yaochu Jin, CIS President 2024-2025
Westlake University, Hangzhou, China