On June 16, 2006, the awarding ceremony of Prof. Li Xiaorong (New Orleans University, United States) as Guangbiao Chair Professor of Zhejiang University was held in the University.
Prof. Li Xiaorong is an outstanding alumnus of ZhejiangUniversity. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees from Zhejiang University in 1982 and 1984 respectively, then the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Connecticut, USA in 1990 and 1992. Now he is the director of Information and SystemsTechnologyResearchCenter (jointly established by 5 universities in USA), the chairman of the Electrical Engineering Department, and a full professor of New OrleansUniversity in United States. He served as the president of the International Society of Information Fusion (ISIF) in 2003 , the editor of the IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems and the editor of the Communications in Information and Systems as well as a IEEE Fellow. His main research field is information fusion, and he has obtained many internationally recognized excellent research achievements in the fields of target tracking and estimation theory, published more than 100 journal and conference papers, and been charged with several large projects. In 1998, he won the Career Award from U.S. National Science Foundation, in the words of the U.S. National Science Foundation Panel for Career Award, he was touted as 'has made a breakthrough's contribution in these areas.'As an internationally well-known leading expert in estimation and target tracking, Dr. Li Xiaorong was acknowledged as one of the ten most famous international experts in the fields of target tracking and information fusion by Missile Defense Institution of United States in 1999.
Among the period while Prof. Li Xiaorong works in ZhejiangUniversity, he will deliver several lectures that involve the new advance in the field of information fusion for the graduate students. Also Prof. Li Xiaorong will cooperate with Zhejiang University to recruit and bring up doctoral students, and has signed a cooperation program contract with the Department of System Science and Engineering of College of Electric Engineering to choose doctoral students to conduct research projects abroad, besides he will cooperate with Zhejiang University to apply key projects of China National Nature Science Foundation and '973' Projects, help to construct an research group in the field of information fusion, and plan the discipline research direction. Meanwhile, he will actively advance international academic exchange and research cooperation for the disciplines, strengthen the exchange and cooperation between ZhejiangUniversity and the University of New Orleans.
After the ceremony, Prof. Li Xiaorong delivered a lecture entitled 'Election, Democracy, and Information Fusion'. Based on various election strategies, the lecture proceeds from Nobel Laureate's theories and information fusion, opens out the limitation of democracy thought by some examples, discusses the relations between voting, group decision, decision fusion, and other technical topics such as performance comparison of algorithms. The students from the
College of Electrical Engineering attended the ceremony, and showed great interests in the contents of the lecture.
