Systems, Man & Cybernetics - July 2017 - 29

Research achievements have allowed RBC to develop into a promising computational methodology that
uses roles as a primary underlying
mechanism to facilitate collaborative
activities. It has also progressed into a
discovery methodology in conducting
investigations in collaboration and
collaborative systems because the
E-CARGO model is highly abstract
and well specified. For example, assignment problems have been investigated for many years by numerous
researchers. However, it is the E-CARGO
model that helps Zhu and his team discover the many-to-many assignment
problem and determine an efficient
solution that was published by the
prestigious journal Theoretical Computer Science. With the development of
the RBC and E-CARGO research, Zhu
has specified a new promising methodology, i.e., adaptive collaboration based
on E-CARGO, that should contribute
significantly to the research of collaborative systems by introducing adaptations and optimizations.
International Recognition
His research has also been recognized
by peer researchers across the world.
His paper "Role-Based Collaboration
and its Kernel Mechanisms" has been
cited more than 100 times by other
researchers, and his Google Scholar
h-index quickly increased to 24. His
ResearchGate (RG) score is collected
to 27. Many international researchers
and students have contacted him for
his papers, articles, and ideas. He has
established long-term research cooperation with Nanjing University, China,
and Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou, China.
Zhu's CoSys Lab has trained three
postdoc researchers, three visiting
scholars, three Ph.D. students, and
many master's students, primarily in
the field of RBC and E-CARGO. From
2009 to 2014, Luca Ferrari from Italy
was attracted to his lab as an adjunct
professor to perform cooperative research. He and Zhu published a role
modeling article in the prestigious software engineering journal Software:
Practice and Experience.

Zhu's research team has now
grown, as the number of followers
in research is rapidly increasing. His
team is organized internationally by
a WeChat group, including Dongning
Liu, associate professor of Guangdong
University of Technology, Guangzhou,
China; Hua Ma, associate professor of
Hunan Normal University, Changsha,
China, who is also a postdoc research
fellow in Zhu's Lab; Hongyu Zhang,
associate professor of Central South
University, Changsha, China, who is
also a visiting scholar in Zhu's lab; Jie
Yang, lecturer of Hangzhou Dianzi University, who will be a visiting scholar
in Zhu's CoSys Lab; Xianjun Zhu, lecturer of Jinling Institute of Technology, Nanjing, China; Qilin Wu, associate professor of Chaohu University,
China; Linyuan Liu, lecturer of Nanjing
Audit University, Nanjing, China; and
Youfa Wang, lecturer of Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, China.
D. Liu is expanding his research
on tree-style group role assignments
and the application of E-CARGO in
the investment decision making and
optimized assignments of clients to
banking products. Additionally, Ma is
utilizing the E-CARGO model to optimize the performance of service composition for data-intensive applications
in a cloud computing environment.
Along with them, Zhang is applying
E-CARGO into the site recommendations by optimizing the cost-effectiveness of tourists. Yang is investigating how to apply E-CARGO in the
decision making of trusted resource
allocations on multiclouds, while X.
Zhu is investigating dynamic group
role assignment with genetic algorithms. Wu is exploiting RBC and
E-CARGO for relay assignment in
cooperative networks, and L. Liu
is developing algorithms based on
E-CARGO to minimize the leaking of
cloud computing clients' privacy.
Finally, Wang is conducting research
to optimize task distributions of robots in multirobot systems.
Along with publishing his work,
Zhu actively disseminates his ideas in
research and has volunteered to serve
the SMCS and other communities. He
Ju ly 2017

has been invited to give more than
50 talks, tutorials, and presentations
on RBC and E-CARGO internationally,
e.g., Canada, the United States, China,
the United Kingdom, Turkey, Singapore, and Hong Kong. He served as
the cochair of the Technical Committee of Distributed Intelligent Systems
in 2004 and as a social media cochair
and web cochair of the 2014 IEEE International Conference on Systems,
Man, and Cybernetics at San Diego,
California. He was also the program
cochair of the 17th IEEE International
Conference on Computer Supported
Cooperative Work in Design at Whistler, British Columbia, Canada, June
2013. He has organized more than ten
special sessions for the annual SMC
conference with topics in collaborative systems.
Zhu is participating in the organization of the IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics,
Banff, Canada, as an area cochair, the
publicity cochair, and a special session
organizer. Furthermore, he is currently
an associate editor of IEEE Systems,
Man, and Cybernetics Magazine. He
has been a Senior Member of the IEEE
since 2004. He is actively connected
with peer researchers through e-mail
and the Internet, and William A. Gruver,
who was a senior past president of the
SMCS, praised Zhu as a five-minute
email responder while they were organizing the SMC 2014 conference.
Zhu would like to collaborate with
researchers all over the world who are
interested in RBC and E-CARGO, and
he is happy to offer his insights to the
SMCS and other research communities regarding his research on RBC and
E-CARGO and their applications. He
believes that RBC and E-CARGO will
find an increasing number of successful applications in different research
fields and industry practices, including the frontier hot topics such as big
data, could computing, artificial intelligence, social simulations, intelligent
transportations, scheduling, robot
teams, systems of systems, and adaptive systems.

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Systems, Man & Cybernetics - July 2017