The National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) has announced the results of its 2026 applications. Following the award of the Young Scientists Fund (Category A) to Professor Zhu Tianqing, dean of the Faculty of Data Science (FDS) at City University of Macau (CityU), four more faculty members from FDS, including Assistant Professor Zhou Dawei, Xu Heng, Lai Shuying and Qin Peng, as well as Assistant Professor Wang Fangzhi from Faculty of Finance (FOF) have received the Young Scientists Fund (Category C).
The Young Scientists Fund (Category C) is designed to support young researchers conduct basic research within the scope of the NSFC, nurture independent research skills and innovative research, and stimulate the creative thinking of young researchers.
This achievement demonstrated the solid research strength of the faculty and research teams, showcased their leading innovative thinking and strong dedication to research. It marks a new step forward for the University’s advancement in cutting-edge research innovation, and the development of young research talent and the research teams, further promoting its disciplinary development and research quality.
Assistant Professor Zhou Dawei’s project is entitled “Research on Robustness Enhancement Methods for Visual Perception against Complex Adversarial Noise”. The project addresses the serious threat posed by complex and varied adversarial noise to intelligent visual perception in real-world scenarios, It explores the formation mechanisms of visual representations and the generalization mechanisms of inference. Professor Zhou is an Assistant Professor at FDS. His primary research interests include trustworthy machine learning, visual content generation, and AI for healthcare. He is currently leading projects funded by the Macao Science and Technology Development Fund (Capacity Enhancement Program) and the NSFC (Young Scientists Fund Category C). His research has been published in journals such as IEEE TPAMI, IEEE TDSC, IEEE TMM, and IJCV, as well as in conferences including ICML, ICCV, and AAAI. He also serves as a reviewer for international journals and conferences such as IEEE TIFS, TMLR, NeurIPS, and CVPR.
Assistant Professor Xu Heng’s project is entitled “Research on Machine Unlearning Mechanisms for Complex Associative Knowledge in Large Language Models.” The project focuses on the similar semantic and logical reasoning associations among knowledge units in large language models, and systematically investigates machine unlearning mechanisms for complex associative knowledge. It aims to address core challenges including the precise definition of unlearning boundaries, the coordination between unlearning thoroughness and performance stability, and the evaluation of associative knowledge unlearning. Professor Xu serves as an Assistant Professor and Master Supervisor at FDS. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Technology Sydney in 2025. His primary research interests include AI security, machine unlearning, and privacy protection. His research has been published in top international academic journals such as ACM Computing Surveys, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, and IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems.
Assistant Professor Qin Peng’s approved project is entitled “Research on Information Representation Methods for Cross‑scenario Semantic Interoperability”. The project addresses the challenges of cross-organizational data heterogeneity, semantic entropy increase, and the inadequacy of existing standards and large language models in cross-context adaptation during digital transformation. It aims to construct an underlying semantic representation framework. The objectives include establishing a theoretical model for information representation that carries multidimensional attributes and business rules; developing a case‑grammar‑constrained large model parsing mechanism to mitigate hallucinations; and building a computable semantic coding system compliant with the FAIR principles. The project integrates case grammar, collaborative mechanisms, and large models, and carries out three tasks including collaborative terminology construction, information representation modelling, and deep syntactic-semantic annotation. It aims to achieve structured representation from atomic to complex concepts and semantic extraction from unstructured text. This research enriches information representation theory and advances computational linguistics and knowledge representation methods. It has potential applications in government, finance, industry, and other fields, supporting intelligent retrieval and decision-making, and providing feasible solutions for semantic governance. Assistant Professor Qin serves as an assistant professor and master supervisor at FDS. His research interests include e-commerce technology, semantic integration, and information systems.
Assistant Professor Wang Fangzhi’s approved project is entitled “Research on the Optimal Path of Carbon Emission Reduction and Coordinated Policies under Macroeconomic Structural Transformation”. Dr. Wang is currently an Assistant Professor at FOF. His research interest lies in the intersection of environmental and digital macroeconomics. In particular, he has been working on integrated climate-economy modelling and its use for welfare and policy analysis. His research has been published in journals such as European Economic Review, Decision Analysis (a journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, INFORMS), Economics Letters, Energy Economics, Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, and the Chinese journal Systems Engineering - Theory & Practice. His work has been featured on the official website of the Global Climate Change Integrated Assessment Model Consortium, and he received the “Best Paper Award” at the 2nd International Conference on Climate Leadership of the Chinese Economic Association (UK/Europe). He has also presented his research at major international conferences, including the World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economists, the CEPR (Centre for Economic Policy Research) workshop, the Mannheim Energy and Environment Conference at the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) in Germany, and the annual conference of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. He has participated in major projects and distinguished young scholar projects funded by the NSFC.
