Dr. Yi Mei is an Associate Professor at the School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand. He received his BSc and PhD degrees from University of Science and Technology of China in 2005 and 2010, respectively. His research interests include evolutionary computation for combinatorial optimisation, genetic programming, automatic algorithm design, explainable AI, multi-objective optimisation, transfer/multitask learning and optimisation.

Yi has more than 180 fully refereed publications, including the top journals in EC and Operations Research (OR) such as IEEE TEVC, IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, European Journal of Operational Research, ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, and top EC conferences (GECCO). He won an IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation Outstanding Paper Award 2017, a GECCO Best Paper Award 2022, the EuroGP Best Paper Award 2022, and a Victoria University of Wellington Early Research Excellence Award 2018. As the sole investigator, he won the 2nd prize of the Competition at IEEE WCCI 2014: Optimisation of Problems with Multiple Interdependent Components. He is the Founding Chair of the IEEE Taskforce on Evolutionary Scheduling and Combinatorial Optimisation. He serves as a Vice-Chair of the IEEE CIS Emergent Technologies Technical Committee, and a member of three IEEE CIS Task Forces and two IEEE CIS Technical Committees. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, an Editorial Board Member of International Journal of Bio-Inspired Computation, an Associate Editor of International Journal of Applied Evolutionary Computation and International Journal of Automation and Control, and a guest editor of a special issue of the Genetic Programming Evolvable Machine journal. He has organised a number of special sessions in international conferences such as IEEE CEC. He serves as a reviewer of over 50 international journals including the top journals in EC and OR. He was an Outstanding Reviewer for Applied Soft Computing in 2015 and 2017, and IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics in 2018. He is a Fellow of Engineering New Zealand and an IEEE Senior Member.