I joined School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham as a PhD student since Sep. 2021, contributing to UKRI Turing AI Acceleration Fellowship project on ``Rigorous Time-Complexity Analysis of Coevolutionary Algorithms”, led by Professor Per Kristian Lehre. I am fortunate to be supervised by Professor Per Kristian Lehre.

My research mainly focuses on Artificial Intelligence, Optimisation, Evolutionary Algorithm. I am interested in reinforcement learning and the combination with evolutionary computation methods.

Before my PhD, I was a MSc Mathematics student at Imperial College London with a focus on probability theory, Markov processes and random matrix theory. I have completed my BSc Maths degree at Warwick before going to Imperial.

Me? Mathematician? Computer Scientist? Or both?

Research Interests

1. Randomised algorithms including evolutionary algorithms or other bio-inspired algorithms

2. Applied Probability and its applications on theoretical analysis of randomised algorithms

3. Black-Box optimisation, adversarial optimisation.

4. Machine learning, reinforcement learning and their interplay with evolutionary computation

News:

29 Apr. 2025: Our paper has been accepted in IJCAI 2025

10-15 Dec. 2024: Physically attended the NeurIPS Conference 2024 and presented our accepted paper “No Free Lunch Theorem and Black-Box Complexity Analysis for Adversarial Optimisation”, in Vancouver, Canada

9 Dec. 2024: Our paper with Prof. Per Kristian Lehre has been accepted as Oral (top 4.6%) in AAAI 2025

22 Nov. 2024: Physically attended the Second UK AI Conference 2024 at Birmingham

26 Sep. 2024: Our paper with Prof. Per Kristian Lehre has been accepted in NeurIPS 2024

14-18 Sep. 2024: Physically attended PPSN 2024 conference and presented our accepted paper “Overcoming Binary Adversarial Optimisation with Competitive Coevolution”, in Hagenberg, Austria

3-9 Aug. 2024: Physically attended IJCAI 2024 conference and presented our accepted paper “Concentration Tail-Bound Analysis of Coevolutionary and Bandit Learning Algorithms”, in Jeju, South Korea

19 June. 2024: Physically attended Artifical Intelligence Workshop and gave a talk about “Runtime Analysis in AI Theory Studies How Algorithm Iterations are Influenced by Design and Problem Structure” at Tsinghua University, in Beijing, China

31 May. 2024: Our paper with Prof. Per Kristian Lehre has been accepted in PPSN 2024

18 Apr. 2024: Our paper with Prof. Per Kristian Lehre has been accepted in IJCAI 2024

17-18 Apr. 2024: Physically attended workshop on Evolutionary Computation at Nanjing University, in Nanjing, China

18 Mar. 2024: Physically attended Early Career Researchers Connect (ECR Connect) organised by The Alan Turing Institute, in London, UK

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Email Address:

My email is sxl1242@student.bham.ac.uk.

Feel free to drop me an email if you find any interesting topics related to above and want to discuss!