Abstract: This talk begins with an introduction to information process in the human brain and the evolution of neural self-organization in nature. This is followed by an overview of research efforts that endeavor to understand principles behind biological neural self-organization in computational systems, including the coupling between the evolution and development of the nervous systems and body plan. Then, recent advances in constructing large spiking neural networks are presented, paying special attention to brain-inspired models simulating different cognitive pathways in the brain. This talk is concluded by discussing the need to move towards embodied brain-like computing systems to enable them to autonomously learn, develop and evolve.

Biography: Yaochu Jin is Chair Professor of AI, Director of the Trustworthy and General AI Lab, Head of Artificial Intelligence Department, School of Engineering, Westlake University, Hangzhou, China. Prior to that, he was Alexander von Humboldt Professor for Artificial Intelligence endowed by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, with the Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University, Germany from 2021 to 2023, and Surrey Distinguished Chair, Professor in Computational Intelligence, Department of Computer Science, University of Surrey, Guildford, U.K. from 2010 to 2021. He was also “Finland Distinguished Professor” with University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and “Changjiang Distinguished Visiting Professor” with the Northeastern University, China from 2015 to 2017. His main research interests include evolutionary optimization, evolutionary machine learning, trustworthy AI, embodied AI, and evolutionary developmental systems.

Prof Jin is presently the President of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society and the Editor-in-Chief of Complex & Intelligent Systems. He is the recipient of the 2025 IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award, the 2017, 2020 and 2023 IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation Outstanding Paper Award, and the 2014, 2016, and 2019 IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine Award. He was named by the Web of Science as “a Highly Cited Researcher” from 2019 consecutively. He is a Member of Academia Europaea and Fellow of IEEE.