Profile

Ning Zhong is currently head of Knowledge Information Systems Laboratory, and a professor in Department of Life Science and Informatics, Maebashi Institute of Technology, Japan. He is also CEO of Web Intelligence Laboratory, Inc., a new type of venture intelligent IT business company. Before moving to Maebashi Institute of Technology, he was an associate professor in Department of Computer Science and Systems Engineering, Yamaguchi University, Japan. He is also director and an adjunct professor in the International WIC Institute, Beijing University of Technology.

Dr. Zhong received the Ph.D. degree in the interdisciplinary course on advanced science and technology from the University of Tokyo. His research interests include Web intelligence (WI), brain informatics (BI), knowledge discovery and data mining, rough sets and granular-soft computing, intelligent agents and databases, intelligent information systems, with more than 250 journal and conference publications, as well as more than 30 books. He is also an author of chapters for several important books such as The Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Engineering (Wiley), Encyclopedia of Microcomputers (Marcel Dekker), the Handbook of Expert Systems (Academic Press), Web Intelligence (Springer), Web Intelligence Meets Brain Informatics (Springer), Rough-Neuro Computing (Springer), Intelligent Technologies for Information Analysis (Springer).

In 2000 and 2004, Dr. Zhong and colleagues introduced Web Intelligence (WI) and Brain Informatics (BI) as new research directions, respectively. Currently, he is focusing on "WI meets BI" research with three aspects: (1) systematic investigations for complex brain science problems; (2) new information technologies for supporting systematic brain science studies; and (3) BI studies based on WI research needs. The synergy between WI and BI advances our ways of analyzing and understanding of data, information, knowledge, wisdom, as well as their interrelationships, organizations, and creation processes, to achieve human-level Web intelligence reality. In 2010, Dr. Zhong and colleagues extended such a vision to develop Wisdom Web of Things (W2T) as a holistic framework for computing and intelligence in the big data era. In 2015, Zhong and his group joined BigNeuro project organized by Allen Institute for Brain Science, and have been working on brain big data based wisdom service project, in which the fundamental issues include how brain informatics based big data interacts in the social-cyber-physical space of the W2T and how to realize human-level collective intelligence as a big data sharing mind, a harmonized collectivity of consciousness on the W2T that uses brain-inspired intelligent technologies to provide wisdom services.

Dr. Zhong is the founding editor-in-chief of Web Intelligence journal (the old name: the Web Intelligence and Agent Systems journal) (IOS Press), the editor-in-chief of Brain Informatics journal (Springer), the editor-in-chief of Brain Informatics & Health (BIH) book series (Springer), and serves as associate editor/editorial board for several international journals and book series including IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (2005-2008), Knowledge and Information Systems (Springer) (1999-2012), IEEE Intelligent Systems, Cognitive Systems Research (Elsevier), Health Information Science and Systems (Springer), Computational Intelligence (Wiley-Blackwell), Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering (Bentham Science), Transactions on Rough Sets (Springer), International Journal of Information Technology and Decision Making (World Scientific), and International Journal of Semantic Computing (World Scientific), Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing (AI&KP) book series (Springer), Frontiers in AI and Applications book series (IOS Press), Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery book series (Chapman&Hall/CRC Press), book series editor of Brain Informatics and Health (Springer), and editor (the area of intelligent systems) of the Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Engineering (Wiley).

Dr. Zhong has also served or is currently serving as guest editors of special issues for several international journals including IEEE Computer, IEEE Intelligent Systems, ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery in Data, World Wide Web Journal (Springer), Computational Intelligence (Wiley-Blackwell), International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence (World Scientific), International Journal of Semantic Computing (World Scientific), Journal of Intelligent Information Systems (Kluwer), Knowledge Based Systems (Elsevier), and Cognitive Systems Research (Elsevier).

Dr. Zhong is the co-founder and co-chair of Web Intelligence Consortium (WIC), chair of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Task Force on Brain Informatics, an advisory board member of International Rough Set Society, co-founder and steering committee co-chair of IEEE/WIC/ACM international conference on Web Intelligence (WI), and co-founder and steering committee co-chair of international conference on Brain Informatics & Health (BIH). He has served as chair of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Intelligent Informatics (TCII) (2006-2009), member of the steering committee of IEEE International Conferences on Data Mining (ICDM) (2000-2009). He has served or is currently serving on the program committees of over 100 international conferences and workshops, including ICDM'02 (conference chair), ICDM'06 (program chair), WI-IAT'03 (conference chair), WI-IAT'01 and WI-IAT'04 (program chair), IJCAI'03 (advisory committee member), Brain Informatics 2009 (program chair), AMT'11 (program chair), and World Intelligence Congress 2012, Web Intelligence Congress 2014 (steering chair).

As recognition of his contributions, Dr. Zhong was invited to give keynote/invited plenary talks, tutorial speakers at many international conferences, including IJCRS'15, 2015 Sino-Dutch Forum on ICT for Smart City, ITQM'14, ICDS'14, PAKDD'14, APEC Smart-City'14, DANTH'13, IFAIT'13, IWDD'13, 2013 Sino-Dutch Forum on ICT for Smart City, ICCS'12, APEC Smart-City'12, iThing'11, KICSS'11, CSO'10, ICCS'10, BIFE'09, ICCI'09, GrC'08, IEA-AIE'08, ESWC'07, PReMI'07, AWIC'07, AIS-ADM'07, PRICAI'06, WI/IAT'06, AWIC'05, MDAI'05, AMT'04 and AWIC'03, PAKDD 2000 among others.

Dr. Zhong was awarded the best paper awards of BIH'14, AMT'06, JSAI'03, IEEE-TCII/ICDM Outstanding Service Award in 2004, ACM's Recognition of Service Award in 2001 and 2012, and Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD) Most Influential Paper Award (1999-2008).

Dr. Zhong is a senior member of IEEE, a fellow of IRSS, and a member of IPSJ, JSAI, IEEE-CS, IEEE-CIS, IEEE-SMC, and ACM.