About Our Lab

Nature Inspired Computation and Applications Laboratory (NICAL) was first founded in 2003 by Profs Xin Yao and Ke Tang at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei, China, with a group of professors, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students. It moved to the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in Shenzhen, China, in 2017.

Since 2024, NICAL has expanded to Hong Kong, China, setting up a branch at Lingnan University (LU), i.e., NICAL@LU, which maintains close ties to NICAL@SUSTech. NICAL is one of the few international research laboratories that have two physical branches in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. We collaborate actively with researchers from all over the world, including joint publications, joint projects and joint PhD student training.