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Welcome to COLA Laboratory #

Computational Optimization for Learning and Adaptive Systems (COLA) laboratory has contributed the fundamental development of computational/artificial intelligence (CI/AI) for black-box optimization and decision-making (especially with multiple conflicting objectives), as well as applications in life sciences (including bioscience and healthcare) and software engineering. In particular, we have been enthusiastic about broad AI+X (integrating AI with application domains denoted by “X” to enhance, innovate, or transform the domain).

We are constantly looking for talented and passionate people to join our lab. Please refer to vacancies for potential opportunities.

Recent News (Year 2025) #

  • Congratulations to Shengbo whose recent paper on “Optimal Parameter Adaptation for Safety-Critical Control via Safe Barrier Bayesian Optimization” has been accepted to IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology. In this paper, Shengbo developed a new theoretical framework for safety-critical control and connect that within Bayesian optimization. Very nice piece of work and it should be insightful for many follow-up works. Congratulations once again and very well done. Apr 11

  • Congratulations to Tianmeng who has been awarded the EPSRC DLA PhD studentship. This is a highly competitive scheme where only 15 studentships will be awarded and the amount of international students is limited to at most 30% (i.e., only international 4 studentship will be awarded across the entire university). We are very welcoming Tianmeng to land in Exeter this fall! Apr 9

  • Glad to share a good news that my nomination to the ACM Senior Member category has been approved the ACM Award Committee today. This is a prestigious award for recognizing scientists who have significant contributions to the computing domain. I would like to thank all my students, postdocs, and collaborators who worked with me in the past several years! Looking forward to working you all for more fun reseach. Apr 8

  • Congratulations to our recent MSCA Doctoral Networks 2024 proposal has been awarded! Glad to join the amazing team to build this multi-million consortium for doctoral training in a critical field of safety for Internet of Energy. Apr 2

  • Our proposal for organizing a competition on genomics foundation models associated with ECML/PKDD 2025 has been accepted. We are thrilled to organize this dedicated competition on AI for biology in a top-tier conference. Please help populate this event to your colleagues who are also working on this domain. Looking forward to your submissions. Apr 1

  • Our proposal for organizing EMO 2027 at Exeter has been approved! EMO is a dedicated and flagship conference in the evolutionary multi-objective optimization community. It has been over 14 years since its last showcase in Sheffield (I was still a PhD student at that time). Looking forward to your submissions and seeing you in beautiful Exeter then! Apr 1

  • Our recent paper on “Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Transformer with Hybrid Attention for Insulator Defect Detection” has been accepted to IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation & Measurement. Congratulations to Jiangjiao! Apr 1

  • Congratulations to our recent Royal Society Award has been confirmed. Apr 1

  • Our proposal to organize a competition on genomics foundation models associated with ECML/PKDD 2025 has been accepted. We are thrilled to organize this dedicated competition on AI for biology in a top-tier conference. Please help populate this event to your colleagues who are also working on this domain. Looking forward to your submissions. Mar 31

  • Congratulations to our recent Royal Society Award for the International Exchange 2024 Global Round 3. We were previously informed to be in the reserve list, but finally get funded! Looking forward to build networks with Prof. Yew-Soon Ong in the Nanyang Technological University in the next two years. Mar 28

  • Our recent paper on “FlowJD: Your Imagination can Help You Jailbreak in Visual Language Models” has been accepted to ICME 2025. Congratulations to Xiaotian! Mar 21

  • Our paper “Optimal Parameter Adaptation for Safety-Critical Control via Safe Barrier Bayesian Optimization” has been conditionally accepted to IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology after minor corrections. In this work, we developed a theoretical framework for safe control problems from the perspective of optimization. This is a very important line of research that may set a new direction for optimization in real-world scenarios. Very well done, Shengbo! Feb 13

  • Our paper “Faster Configuration Performance Bug Testing with Neural Dual-level Prioritization” has been accepted to ICSE 2025. This work developed a predictive modeling tool to prioritize the test case generation for detecting configuration performance bugs, where some configuration options to unexpectedly degrade performance which deviates from their original expectations designed by the developers. This is a very interesting problem when tackling highly complex configurable software systems. Very well done, Youpeng! Jan 19

  • There is an interdisciplinary PhD studentship opportunity (for both UK and international students) in my group with a collaboration with GE Healthcare. In this project, we will explore and design exciting explainable AI agentic framework for early diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. Please see the outline information as follows. Please contact with me if you are interested in this opportunity. The application deadline is February 10, 2025.

Previous news can be found from our news archive.

Contact #

Dr. Ke Li
Department of Computer Science
Room A1-D, Innovation Centre Phase 1
University of Exeter
Streatham Campus, North Park Road
Exeter, EX4 4RN, UK
E-mail: k.li AT exeter.ac.uk
Tel: +(44) 0139-272-4557