Dr. Huanhuan Chen, a former PhD student and Research Associate at Cercia, won the 2011 IEEE CIS Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award (http://ieee-cis.org/announcements/detail/?id=6). This is a prestigious international award in the field of computational intelligence, covering neural network, fuzzy systems, evolutionary computation, etc. Only one award is given each year. Huanhuan’s winning thesis on “Diversity and Regularization in Neural Network Ensembles” can be found from http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/scshc/papers/thesis.pdf.

This is the second time in three years that a former Birmingham PhD student and Cercia Research Associate won the prestigious award. Dr. Siang Yew Chong won the 2009 IEEE CIS Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award for his thesis on “Generalization and Diversity in Co-evolutionary Learning” (http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~xin/papers/sychongthesis.pdf).