Rate My Professor Defu Zhang

Defu Zhang is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science, School of Information Science and Engineering at Xiamen University, where he holds positions as Associate Chair in Graduate Studies for the department and Deputy Director of the school. He leads the Computer Software and Theory research direction in the Ph.D. program in Computer Science and Technology. Zhang earned his B.S. degree in computational mathematics in 1996 and M.S. degree in 1999 from Xiangtan University, and his Ph.D. in computer science from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2002. His early career included serving as a senior researcher at Shanghai Jinxin Financial Engineering Academe and completing a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Longtop Company in the financial data mining group. He has visited City University of Hong Kong as a research fellow five times.

Zhang's research specializations encompass computational intelligence, data mining, big data analytics and processing, cloud computing, business intelligence, knowledge engineering, granular computing, optimization algorithms, and combinatorial optimization, with applications in finance, restaurant management, logistics, and intelligent agriculture. He directs the Big Data and Computational Intelligence team, consisting of four professors, eight associate professors, two assistant professors, and more than thirty graduate students, and has spearheaded projects such as algorithm.xmu.edu.cn and Research on Parallel Metaheuristic Algorithms based on Spark funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China. A senior member of the China Computer Federation and member of its Computer Theory Professional Committee, Zhang has published over 50 SCI papers, garnering more than 10,000 citations on Google Scholar with an H-index of 33. Key works include "Using deep transfer learning for image-based plant disease identification" (2020), "Detection of rice plant diseases based on deep transfer learning" (2020), "A simulated annealing algorithm for the capacitated vehicle routing problem with two-dimensional loading constraints" (2018), and "A new fuzzy time series forecasting model combined with ant colony optimization and auto-regression" (2015). His students have excelled, securing three gold medals in ACM/ICPC, national Spark developer competition championships, and gold in Internet+ innovation contests.