Short Curriculum Vitae
Dr. Fuji Ren is currently the Professor and Director of Affective Computing and Intelligent Robot Laboratory in Tokushima University. He is also the President of International Advanced Information Institute in Japan. He is a member of The Engineering Academy of Japan, a member of EU Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the Japan Federation of Engineering Societies, a fellow of The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers, and a fellow of Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence.
He received his B.E. degree in 1982 and M.E. degree in 1985 from the department of Computer Science, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China. He received his Ph.D. in 1991 from Faculty of Engineering, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan. From 1991 to 1994, he worked at CSK in Tokyo, Japan where he was the chief NLP researcher. He joined the Faculty of Information Sciences at Hiroshima City University as an Associate Professor in 1994. In 2001, he became a Professor in the Faculty of Engineering at Tokushima University. He has been the president of AIA International Advanced Information Institute since 2003. He serves as the Director of the Dept. of Information Science and Intelligent Systems from 2006 to 2010, the vice Dean of Information Solution Branch of Graduate School of Engineering from 2010 to 2012, and Dean of Information Solution Branch Graduate School of Engineering from 2012 to 2016 at Tokushima University.
He also holds professor positions at Dalian University of Technology, Harbin University of Technology and Xi’an Jiaotong University. He holds the roles of Advisory Professor at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Research Advisor at Tsinghua University, Visiting Professor at University of Science and Technology of China, Yangtze River Professor at Nanjing University, and Advisory Professor at Tongji University. He was a visiting professor at CRL (Computing Research Laboratory) at New Mexico State University, a visiting research professor in the College of Engineering, at Florida International University, and a visiting professor in Harvard University in the USA.
His current research interests include Affective Computing and Intelligent Robot, Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, Language Understanding and Communication, Information Retrieval, Super-Function Methodology, Machine Learning, Knowledge Engineering, and Enlarged Health and Intelligence Education.
He has made fundamental contributions in the fields of human emotion recognition and robotic emotion creation, as well as natural speech understanding and emotional robotics development. He was the first in the world to propose the theory of mental state transition network, which established a methodology for recognizing human emotions, creating machine emotions, and constructing large emotional corpuses. In addition, he researched and developed fundamental technologies for the development of robotic brains and emotions based on language, speech, and facial expressions.
He has directed and participated in over 50 research and development projects, as the PI of more than 30 grants with over 500 million Yen in total funding.
He has authored or co-authored more than 20 books, 300 research journal papers and 500 conference papers. Many of his publications appeared in top conferences and journals, including IEEE, ACM, IEICE, IEEJ, CAAI and Information Sciences. He has been invited as a speaker or keynote speaker for more than 100 times in the USA, China, Japan, Singapore, France, and other countries.
(Please see http://pub2.db.tokushima-u.ac.jp/ERD/person/19966/work-en.html for the list.)
He has supervised 42 Ph.D. students (list of Ph.D. supervised by Prof. Fuji Ren) and more than 130 Masters students.
He received more than 50 Awards and Honors, such as The Chinese Government Friendship Award, PRC, 2019; Outstanding Contribution Award for the 7th Council of the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence, CAAI, 2019; Academician of The Engineering Academy of Japan, 2018; Academician of EU Academy of Sciences, 2018; Invention Prize, for “Multi-modal emotional computing and advanced intelligent applications”, China Association of Inventions, 2018; Science and Technology Award (Science and Technology Promotion Category), Tokushima Prefecture, Japan, 2018; Wu Wenjun Artificial Intelligence Science and Technology Progress Award, China, 2018; Fellow of The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers, Japan, 2017; Fellow of The Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence, China, 2017; Best Paper Award, for the paper entitled “Learning Efficient Drawing Sequence Through Training of Recurrent Neural Network Model”, CAAI and IEEE, 2017; Korakukai Foundation Award, for “To create an evolutionary advanced intelligent robot which have a brain and mind”, Japan, 2016; Industry-University-Research Cooperation Innovation Award, China Industry-University-Research Institute Collaboration Association, China, 2016; Best Paper Award, for the paper entitled “Text classification based on word co-occurrence with background knowledge”, CAAI, 2016; Outstanding Contribution Award, Scientific Chinese Person of the Year, China, 2016; Engineering Festival 2015 Excellence Award, for “Development of emotional development robot capable of rich emotional expression and recognition”, Japan, 2015; Wu Wenjun Artificial Intelligence Science and Technology Award, for “Advanced Interactive Robot based on Advanced Intelligence”, Association for Artificial Intelligence, 2014; Best Paper Award, for the paper titled “Class-indexing: The Effectiveness of Class-Space-Density in high and Low-Dimensional Vector Space for Text Classification”, IEEE, 2012; Fellow of Japan Federation of Engineering Society, Japan, 2009; Yangtze River Scholar, the highest academic award issued to an individual in higher education by the Ministry of Education of PRC, 2006; 12th Gennai Award for Natural Science Award, Japan, 2005, etc.
He served at more than 200 international conferences as chair, steering committee member, advisory committee member, executive committee member, program committee member, and organizing committee member at meetings of IEEE, CAAI, IEICE, IASTED, IJAI and other organizations. These include Founder and General Chair of the International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Engineering, IEEE, CAAI (2003- present); Steering Committee Co-Chair, The 10th International Workshop on Assistive Engineering and Information Technology (AEIT 2020); General Co-Chair, the 4th Asian Conference on Artificial Intelligence Technology, (2019- present); Program Committee Co-Chairs, THE 3rd China Intelligence Education Conference (2019- present); Publicity Co-Chair of 14th IEEE International Conference on Networking, Sensing and Control, (2017-2018); Program Committee Co-Chairs, IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing and Intelligence Systems, (2011- present); Advisory Board, The 9th International Conference on Rough Sets and Knowledge Technology (RSKT 2014-2014); Steering Committee, International Workshop on Assistive Engineering (2013- present); General Co-Chair, 2011 International Conference on Information Theory and Information Security (2010-2011); General Chair, International Conference on Advanced Intelligence and Global Engineering Education (2008-2015); Program Committee Co-Chair, 2010 Multi-Conference on Advanced Intelligence (2010-2011); International Advisory Board Chair, 2009 International Conference on Information Management, Innovation Management and Industrial Engineering,(2009-2009); Organizing Committee Co-Chair, International Conference on Information,(2001-2009); International Advisory Board Chairs, International Conference on Advanced Intelligence (2008-2012); The General Chair, International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Affective Computing, (2006-2010); and Program Chair, Joint Workshop on Intelligent System and Information Processing (2016-2017).
He served as editor-in-chief, area editor-in-chief, and editor on more than 20 academic journals, including editor-in-chief, International Journal of Advanced Intelligence, (2009–present); editorial board, CAAI Transactions on Intelligent System, (2013–present); editorial board, Enterprise Information Systems, (2012–present); editorial board, Research Journal on Computer science and computer engineering with applications, (2010– present); editorial board, The Journal of China Universities of Posts and Telecommunications, (2006– present); editorial board, Science & Technology Review, (2006– present); editor, Journal of Chinese Information Processing, (2005-present); editor, Journal of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, (2006– present); associate editor, International Journal of Innovative Computing, Information and Control, (2005– present); editor, International Journal of Information Acquisition, (2005– present); associate editor, Asian Information-Science-Life, (2002– 2004); editor, International Journal of Information Technology and Decision Making, (2004– present); area editor-in-chief, International Journal of Information, (1998– present); editor, International Journal COLIPS, (1996-2005); editor-in- chief, Journal of Science and Technology, (1995-1998); editorial board member, Electronics, and others.
He was invited to be a senior overseas consultant for the BUPT (Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications) Academic Committee, a consultant for the Beijing Lab. of Multi-Media, a senior consultant for Japan PtoPA Inc. and AGI Inc., an academic committee member of the Chinese national laboratory of pattern recognition, an overseas assessor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a senior overseas consultant of China Council for the Promotion of Applied Technology Exchanges with Foreign Countries. He is Honorary Vice President of Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence, (2019-present); Vice President of Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence, (2010-2019); Member of Human Resources Development Committee of EAJ, Japan, (2018-present); President of The Association for Chinese Scientists in Japan, (1993-1995); President of Chinese Academy of Science and Engineering in Japan, (2001-2005); Honorary President of Chinese Academy of Science and Engineering in Japan, (2006-present), and others.