Meet a CIS Member - Ying Bi

 

Meet a CIS Member

Meet:  Ying Bi, 2024 WCI subcommittee chair

What is your title, and place of work? (or Technical Field of Research)?

I am a distinguished professor with the School of Electrical and Information Engineering and the computational intelligence lab at Zhengzhou University (ZZU), China.

How long have you been a member of CIS and what was the reason you chose to join IEEE CIS?

I have been a CIS member for more than five years. I joined initially the CIS community as a graduate student member and become a member after my Ph.D. A significant benefit to join CIS is to have discount for conference registration. I have registered and attended several CIS sponsored conferences, including WCCI/CEC from 2018 to 2023, with reduced registration fees. I have known many senior academics and CIS members by attending these conferences. As a student member, I have also successfully applied for the IEEE CIS Student Travel Award for attending WCCI 2018 in Brazil.

What Computational Intelligence Society committee do you serve?

Currently, I am the chair of the Women in Computational Intelligence (WCI) subcommittee (2024), workshop chair of WCCI/CEC 2024, vice-chair of the IEEE CIS Task Force on Evolutionary Computer Vision and Image Processing, and member of the IEEE CIS Task Force on Evolutionary Computation for Feature Selection and Construction. I was a member of WCI subcommittee (2023), a co-organiser of the IEEE CIS Summer School on Computational Intelligence in Zhengzhou (2023), and a local organizing committee member of CEC 2019.

What have you learned from your experience and how has it helped you professionally?

I have learned a lot from my experiences in attending/ organizing various CIS activities. First, it enables me to know more about the CIS society in terms of the structure, the people, and the operational process. Second, it provides a good chance to meet many academics and researchers who are supportive and friendly to help in our research, career, and life. Third, it develops our skills to communicate with different individuals and work with them towards the same goal.

 

What has been the most fun/rewarding thing about being a volunteer for the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society? What have you enjoyed the most?

My first major volunteer role for CIS was the organising committee member of IEEE CEC 2019, which was held in Wellington, New Zealand. At that time, I was a Ph.D. student and honored to have the chance to be involved in organizing the conference. I learned the experiences of conference organising, which helped me a lot in organising the IEEE CIS Summer School in Zhengzhou in 2023. In addition, the Wechat Public Account created by me for advertising CEC 2019 becomes an important social media with 4000+ followers for advertising some activities and sharing new research in China. Thus, I think the most rewarding thing is to provide opportunities to young researchers to participate in the volunteer jobs and build their capabilities step by step.

Now, I am taking a new volunteer role – the chair of the WCI subcommittee in 2024. I will be rewarded with helping build a gender-diversified environment in CIS conferences by developing, promoting, organising, and running activities to achieve this goal. The activities will be held in CIS conferences, and you are more than welcome to join.

Tell us something about you that we don't know.

Starting from 2024, I am taking more volunteer jobs in IEEE CIS, including the associate editor for the journals of IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation and IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence. As a young female researcher, I really appreciated these opportunities to serve for the community. I am looking forward to having more connections with CIS and I will try my best.