UM students Ren Chang’e (1st from left) and Zhang Tong (1st from right) with Dr Chen Long (right) and Prof Philip Chen
Two PhD students from the University of Macau’s (UM) Faculty of Science and Technology, namely Ren Chang’e and Zhang Tong, recently received the sole Best Conference Paper Award and one of the two Best Student Paper Outstanding Awards, respectively, at the 2015 International Conference on Fuzzy Theory and Its Applications (iFuzzy2015). More than 120 papers were presented at this year’s conference. Ren’s paper, titled ‘Adaptive Consensus Control for Nonlinear Multi-agent Systems’, concerns a new adaptive consensus control algorithm for multi-agent systems with heterogeneous nonlinear dynamics. The fuzzy neural networks and adaptive distributed algorithm are applied to deal with unknown nonlinear dynamics. The new adaptive consensus control algorithm not only allows multi-agent systems to reach leader-following consensus simply based on local information from its neighbour, but it also reduces online learning time and computation burden. Ren’s paper is co-authored with Dr Chen Long from the FST and FST Dean Prof Philip Chen. Zhang’s paper, titled ‘A Novel Image Segmentation Approach Based on Spatial Shadowed Fuzzy C-means and I-Ching Operators’, concerns a novel clustering algorithm for image segmentation, which is based on I-Ching operators and shadowed FCM. A comparison of global optimisation ability and performance shows that the new algorithm achieves better accuracy than other traditional approaches. Zhang’s paper has been recommended for publication in the International Journal of Fuzzy Systems (IJFS), a journal indexed in the SCI-Expanded. The paper is co-authored with Dr Chen Long and Prof Philip Chen. It was one of the nine papers that made the final list of best student papers.