Dr. Liang GAO is Professor of the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering (IMSE), the Deputy Director of State Key Laboratory of Digital Manufacturing Equipment and Technology and vice dean of Institution of Advanced Technology and Equipment, Huazhong University of Science and Technology. He obtained his B.Sc. degree in mechatronic engineering from Xidian University, Xi’an, China, in 1996, and the Ph.D. degree in mechatronic engineering from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan, China, in 2002. He has been a professor at HUST ever since 2006.

He was supported by the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University in 2008. He was also supported by the program for the first level candidates of Hubei New Century high-level talents in 2012.

His research interests include intelligent optimization algorithms, big data, deep learning with theirs application in Design & Manufacturing. He has finished or is undertaking 3 NSFC funded projects and other more than 10 national funded projects. He published more than 150 papers indexed by SCIE, authored 4 monographs and owned 8 authorized invention patents and 13 computer software copyrights.

He currently serves as an Associate Editor of Swarm and Evolutionary Computation, Swarm Intelligence and Numerical Method, Journal of Industrial and Production Engineering. He is editor board member of Operations Research Perspectives, China Mechanical Engineering, Journal of Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications (Natural Science Edition), Journal of Chongqing University. He is also guest editors of Journal of Cleaner Production, International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology and International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology.