Xin Yao is Professor of Computer Science at The University of Birmingham, where he directs the Centre of Excellence for Research in Computational Intelligence and Applications (CERCIA) and leads the Natural Computation Group. Additionally, he is involved in the editorial board of several international journals, in the organisation of international conferences and is a regular keynote or plenary speaker in other conferences and overseas universities. His research interests include evolutionary computation, global optimisation, neural networks, data mining, metaheuristics and real world applications. He has contributed to the field with relevant works on the design of new algorithms and the theoretical study of evolutionary computation, resulting in diverse best paper awards.