Team of University of Surrey

Ferrante NERI is a Full Professor of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Surrey, U.K., and a Jiangsu Distinguished Professor at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology (NUIST), China. He holds two Ph.D. degrees (Electrical Engineering and Mathematical Information Technology) and is Docent (Dosentti) in Computational Intelligence at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and he was an Academy Research Fellow with the Academy of Finland. His research focuses on metaheuristic optimisation and evolutionary computation for machine learning, with particular emphasis on efficient automated model design. Within THUNDER, he contributes methodological work on Neural Architecture Search and optimisation-based strategies for automated architecture construction.

Dr Xilu Wang is a Surrey Future Fellow with the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering at the University of Surrey, Guildford, U.K. She received the B.Sc. degree from Harbin Institute of Technology (China) in 2016, the M.Sc. degree from Xidian University (China) in 2018, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Surrey (U.K.) in 2022. Her research interests include multi-objective optimisation, surrogate-assisted evolutionary optimisation, Bayesian optimisation, fair and federated optimisation, and evolutionary machine learning. Within the THUNDER project, she contributes methodological work on Neural Architecture Search and model compression, developing optimisation-driven approaches for efficient automated model design.