Biographical note

Derong Liu received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA, in 1994. Dr. Liu was a Staff Fellow with General Motors Research and Development Center, from 1993 to 1995. He was an Assistant Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Stevens Institute of Technology, from 1995 to 1999. He joined the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1999, and became a Full Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and of Computer Science in 2006. He was selected for the “100 Talents Program” by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2008. He has published 16 books. Dr. Liu was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, from 2010 to 2015. Currently, he is an elected AdCom member of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, he is the Editor-in-Chief of Artificial Intelligence Review, and he serves as the Vice President of Asia-Pacific Neural Network Society. He was the General Chair of 2014 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence and was the General Chair of 2016 World Congress on Intelligent Control and Automation. He received the Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation in 1999, the University Scholar Award from University of Illinois from 2006 to 2009, the Overseas Outstanding Young Scholar Award from the National Natural Science Foundation of China in 2008, and the Outstanding Achievement Award from Asia Pacific Neural Network Assembly in 2014. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the International Neural Network Society.  

Qinglai Weie="font-family: 'Courier New';"> received the Ph.D. degree in control theory and control engineering, from the Northeastern University, Shenyang, China, in 2009. From 2009 to 2011, he was a postdoctoral fellow with The State Key Laboratory of Management and Control for Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. He is currently a Professor of the institute. Prof. Wei is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems, Information Sciences, Neurocomputing, Optimal Control Applications and Methods, and Acta Automatica Sinica, and was an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems during 2014–2015. He was the organizing committee member of several international conferences. He was recipient of Asia Pacific Neural Networks Society (APNNS) young researcher award in 2016. He was a recipient of the Outstanding Paper Award of Acta Automatica Sinica in 2011 and Zhang Siying Outstanding Paper Award of Chinese Control and Decision Conference (CCDC) in 2015.

Ding Wang received the Ph.D. degree in control theory and control engineering from the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, in 2012. He is currently an Associate Professor with The State Key Laboratory of Management and Control for Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He has been a Visiting Scholar with the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Biomedical Engineering, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI, USA, since 2015. His research interests include adaptive and learning systems, intelligent control, and neural networks. He has published over 70 journal and conference papers, and coauthored two monographs. He was the organizing committee memberof several international conferences. He was recipient of the Excellent Doctoral Dissertation Award of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2013. He serves as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems and Neurocomputing. He is a member of IEEE, Asia-Pacific Neural Network Society (APNNS), and CAA. 

Xiong Yang received the Ph.D. degree in control theory and control engineering from the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, in 2014. Dr. Yang was a recipient of the Excellent Award of Presidential Scholarship of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2014. He was an Assistant Professor with The State Key Laboratory of Management and Control for Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, from 2014 to 2016. He is currently an Associate Professor with School of Electrical Engineering and Automation, Tianjin University.

Hongliang Li received the Ph.D. degree in control theory and control engineering from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2015. Dr. Li was a Research Scientist with IBM Research - China, Beijing, from 2015 to 2016. He joined Tencent Inc., Shenzhen, China, in 2016. He has published more than 10 journal papers on adaptive dynamic programming and reinforcement learning.