Prof Xin Yao is the Vice-President (Research and Innovation) and the Tong Tin Sun Chair Professor of Machine Learning at Lingnan University. Previously, he held academic positions at the Southern University of Science and Technology (China), the University of Birmingham (UK), Australian Defence Force Academy, University College, the University of New South Wales (Australia), and the University of Science and Technology of China (China).

Prof Yao is an internationally renowned scholar in the field of artificial intelligence and his research work has received several awards, including the 2001 IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award, the 2011 IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems Outstanding Paper Award, and the 2010, 2016, and 2017 IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation Outstanding Paper Awards. Prof Yao was elected as an IEEE Fellow in 2003. He won the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2012, the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award in 2013, and the prestigious IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award in 2020. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation in 2003-08 and the President of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society in 2014-15. He was listed in the World's Top 2% Scientists by Stanford University since 2021 and named Highly Cited Researcher in 2022 and 2023. According to Google Scholar, his research has been cited over 76,000 times by other scholars, with an H-index of 126.