Prof Sam Kwong Tak-wu receives 2026 IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation Outstanding Paper Award

Prof Sam Kwong Tak-wu, Associate Vice-President (Strategic Research), Dean of the School of Graduate Studies and J.K. Lee Chair Professor of Computational Intelligence at Lingnan University, has been honoured with the 2026 IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation Outstanding Paper Award for his co-authored paper Learning-Aided Evolution for Optimization. It is the sole paper to receive this award this year, underscoring its importance in the fields of evolutionary computation and AI.

The award, highlighting Prof Kwong’s international leadership in AI research, was established by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, whose journal is a globally recognised academic citation index database platform, ranked 11th among 204 journals in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence category of the Web of Science.

Published in 2023, the award-winning paper introduces a groundbreaking approach that integrates a learning component into traditional evolutionary computation methods, enabling AI to identify optimal solutions faster and more accurately in complex scenarios. The research team developed a novel, learning-aided, evolutionary optimization (LEO) framework, which allows artificial neural networks (ANNs) to learn from successful experiences during the evolutionary process. By observing which solutions outperform previous ones and recording this knowledge for future reference, evolutionary computation methods can move beyond random mutation to leverage past experience, significantly improving efficiency.

For the full paper Learning-Aided Evolution for Optimization, please visit: Learning-Aided Evolution for Optimization | IEEE Journals & Magazine | IEEE Xplore.