Professor Andries Engelbrecht

Professor Andries Engelbrecht’s research interests include swarm intelligence, evolutionary computation, neural networks, artificial immune systems, and the application of these paradigms to data mining, games, bioinformatics, finance, and difficult optimisation problems.

His research career started with a master’s degree at the University of Stellenbosch. His PhD studies introduced him to the field of artificial neural networks, which formed the gateway to his current research in computational intelligence (CI). He currently holds the DST/NRF Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Pretoria (UP).

Following the completion of his PhD in 1998, he focused all his energy on establishing a research group in CI at UP. The CI research group became internationally recognised, with a reputation for producing research outputs of very high quality. Under his leadership, they developed a CI library (CIlib), an open-source library of CI algorithms. A total of 38 MSc and 13 PhD students have graduated under his supervision.

To date he has published 66 papers, two books, seven book chapters and 200 conference articles. The total number of citations of his work is 12 676, and he was recently identified as one of the top 10 cited researchers at UP.

Engelbrecht is an associate-editor for IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation (TEC), Swarm Intelligence (SI), IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games, Soft Computing, and the International Journal of Applied Metaheuristic Computing. He also serves on the editorial board of four other journals. Since the start of his academic career, he has served as reviewer for 73 journals and 23 conferences. 

He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and is a member of the Computational Intelligence Society (CIS), and the Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society (SMC). He is also a member of the Evolutionary Computing (EC) technical committee, the Neural Networks Technical Committee, and the founding chair of the South African chapter of CIS.

Engelbrecht was the recipient of the UP Young Researcher Award in 2003, and the Exceptional Academic Achiever’s Award in 2007, 2010, and 2013.