On December 31, 2025, at the invitation of the School of Management, Professor Chen Weineng from South China University of Technology delivered an academic lecture entitled Distributed Swarm Intelligence Consensus Optimization: From Rule-Driven to Learning-Enabled in Lecture Hall 214 of the School of Management. The lecture was presided over by Professor Wang Yang from the School of Management, and attended by some postgraduate students of the school.

At the outset of the session, Professor Wang Yang briefly introduced Professor Chen Weineng’s professional background and research achievements, and the faculty and students of the School of Management extended a warm welcome to Professor Chen. In this lecture, Professor Chen elaborated on how to address the challenges faced by swarm intelligence decision-making and optimization in distributed environments against the backdrop of complex optimization scenarios such as non-convexity, black-box and high dimensionality that are prevalent in practical applications. First, he introduced biology-inspired and dynamics-based consensus evolutionary optimization, as well as learning-driven consensus evolutionary optimization, and elaborated on related research including multi-agent particle swarm optimization based on internal and external learning and reinforcement learning-aided consensus evolutionary optimization. Second, he presented consensus evolutionary optimization empowered by large models/intelligent agents and privacy-preserving distributed evolutionary optimization, showcasing to the faculty and students his research outcomes such as the autonomous design of Agent hyper-heuristic strategies for multi-role LLM collaboration and privacy-preserving genetic algorithms for combinatorial optimization. Finally, Professor Chen summarized and prospected the future development of distributed evolutionary computation.

After the lecture, Professor Chen Weineng engaged in an in-depth exchange with the faculty and students present on issues related to large models and evolutionary optimization, creating a robust academic atmosphere on site.

Lecturer's Profile

Chen Weineng is a Professor, Doctoral Supervisor and Vice Dean of the School of Computer Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology. His main research interests focus on swarm intelligence, evolutionary computation and their applications. He has published more than 200 papers in international journals and conferences, including over 100 regular papers in IEEE Transactions series. He has led a number of major research projects, such as the National Science and Technology Innovation 2030 – Major Project on "New Generation Artificial Intelligence", the Key Project of the Joint Fund for Enterprise Innovation of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the International Cooperation and Exchange Project of the National Key R&D Program, and the NSFC-Royal Society Newton Advanced Fellowship Project. He also serves as the Director of the Guangdong-Hong Kong Joint Innovation Platform for Big Data and Computational Intelligence.

Professor Chen has been awarded the National Science Fund for Excellent Young Scholars and the Guangdong Provincial Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars, and won the Huo Yingdong Young Teachers Award in 2018. Currently, he holds the positions of Vice Chair of IEEE Guangzhou Section, Chair of IEEE SMC Guangzhou Chapter, Standing Member of the Technical Committee on Collaborative Computing of the China Computer Federation (CCF), Member of the Technical Committee on Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition of CCF. He also serves as an Associate Editor of international journals including IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (IEEE TPAMI), IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation (IEEE TEVC), IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (IEEE TNNLS) and Complex & Intelligent Systems.

(Composed by Lin Yunpei; Reviewed by Jia Ming)