Senior Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence (fangfang.zhang@vuw.ac.nz)
Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (CDSAI)
School of Engineering and Computer Science (SECS)
Victoria University of Wellington (VUW)

For doing research, “Think Big, Start Small, Move Fast”!

PhD Scholarships

• VUW PhD Scholarships: Students (GPA of A- or above) with publications can apply (Closing dates each year: 1 March, 1 November, 1 July, for both domestic and international students)
• CSC-VUW Joint PhD Scholarships: (For Chinese Students Only). Successful students will get 48 months of stipend from China Scholarship Council and VUW will cover the tuition fees up to 48 months. (Closing date: 1 Feb, 1 November Every year)

News

• Based on top 500 NZ researchers provided by Scholarly Output in New Zealand over the period 2022 to 2026 (RSNZ provided), I am honoured to be ranked in the 200th
• Early Career Research Excellence Award, I am honoured to receive a VUW Early Career Research Excellence Award 2025
• Top 2% Scientists 2025, I am honoured to be included in Stanford/Elsevier's Top 2% Scientists list
• Our PhD student, Zhixing Huang, was awarded Excellent Young Scientists Fund Project (Overseas), China, 2025
• Our PhD student, Meng Xu, was awarded Excellent Young Scientists Fund Project (Overseas), China, 2025
• 2025 SIGEVO Dissertation Award, our PhD student, Meng Xu won the 2025 SIGEVO Dissertation Award, Honorable Mention: “Advancing Genetic Programming for Learning Scheduling Heuristics” ($1,000 USD)
• Presentation Award, our PhD student, Yuye Zhang won the Best Presentation Runner-up Award at IEEE Postgradute Symposium 2024 ($200 NZD)
• IEEE CIS Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award, 2025, “Genetic Programming Hyper-heuristics for Dynamic Flexible Job Shop Scheduling” ($1,000 USD)
• Best Poster Runner-up Award, our poster “A Semantic Genetic Programming Approach to Evolving Heuristics for Multi-objective Dynamic Scheduling” won the Best Poster Award Runner-up of Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AJCAI) 2023.
• Best Paper Award, our paper “Grammar-guided Linear Genetic Programming for Dynamic Job Shop Scheduling” won the Best Paper Award of Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) 2023.
• 2023 Humies SILVER Award, presented at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) , "Learning Emergency Medical Dispatch Policies via Genetic Programming", Humies SILVER Award, 2023 ($2,000 USD)
• Presentation Award, our PhD student, Jordan MacLachlan won the VUW 3-minutes Thesis Presentation Second Prize Award, 2023 ($1,000 NZD)
• 2022 SIGEVO Dissertation Award, Honorable Mention: “Genetic Programming Hyper-heuristics for Dynamic Flexible Job Shop Scheduling” ($1,000 USD)
• Our new book published: “Genetic Programming for Production Scheduling: An Evolutionary Learning Approach”, Springer (XXXIII+338 pages, the first book on hyper-heuristic for production scheduling)
• Best Paper Award, our paper “An Investigation of Multitask Linear Genetic Programming for Dynamic Job Shop Scheduling” won the Best Paper Award of European Conference on Genetic Programming (EuroGP) 2022.
• Best Paper Runner-Up Award, our paper “Genetic Programming with Multi-tree Representation for Dynamic Flexible Job Shop Scheduling” won the Best Paper Runner-Up Award of Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AJCAI) 2018.

Research Interests

• Job shop scheduling, hyper-heuristic learning / optimisation
• Artificial intelligence, machine learning
• Evolutionary computation, particularly genetic programming
• Transfer learning, multitask optimisation, multi-objective optimisation
• Feature selection, surrogate, genetic operators

Biography

Fangfang Zhang (Member, IEEE) is a Senior Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence with the Center for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence & School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington. She received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China, and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, in 2014 and 2017, and 2021, respectively. Her PhD thesis received the ACM SIGEVO Dissertation Award, Honorable Mention, and IEEE CIS Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award. She has over 85 fully refereed publications, including the top journals, such as IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, and IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, and received Best Paper (Runner-up) Awards on top/major EC conferences such as GECCO, EuroGP and AJCAI. Her current research interests include evolutionary computation, hyper-heuristic learning/optimisation, job shop scheduling, surrogate and multitask learning. She is recognised as World’s Top 2% Scientists by Stanford/Elsevier. She is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Expert Systems with Applications, and Swarm and Evolutionary Computation. She is a Vice-Chair of the IEEE Task Force on Evolutionary Scheduling and Combinatorial Optimisation. She has organised a number of special sessions and tutorials in international conferences such as IEEE CEC and SSCI. She is the Vice-Chair of IEEE New Zealand Central Section. In addition, she is the Secretary of the AI Researchers Association in New Zealand.