Xiaoying Gao received her BE and ME from China in 1990 and 1992, and PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia in 2000. She is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand. Her research interests include web intelligence, text mining, text classification, clustering, and evolutionary computation. She has over 100 fully refereed international journals and conferences, including the top conferences and journals such as KDD and KAIS. She is a key member of the Web Intelligence Consortium (WIC), and she serves as an associate editor for Web Intelligence: An International Journal, and a vice-chair (2008) and workshop co-chair (2020, 2021) for the IEEE/WIC/ACM Joint Conferences Series on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology.