On February 8, Zhong Ning, an alumnus and Distinguished Professor of BJUT, was elected to the Engineering Academy of Japan (EAJ) as a foreign fellow according to the decision made by the EAJ's Council.

Prof. Zhong graduated from BJUT with a bachelor's degree in Computer Application in 1982. After receiving his Ph.D from the University of Tokyo in Japan in 1995, he worked as a doctoral researcher at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST), University of Tokyo and has been a professor at Maebashi Institute of Technology since 2001. Prof. Zhong is the founder and chairman of Web Intelligence Consortium (WIC), and one of the founders and chairman of the steering committees of IEEE/WIC/ACM international conference on web intelligence and international conference on Brain Informatics. He is the founding editor-in-chief of Web Intelligence (IOS Press), and the founder and editor-in-chief of Brain Informatics (Springer Nature) and Brain Informatics & Health (Springer Nature) series. He has published more than 300 papers in domestic and international academic journals and conferences, including Nature Communications, Communications of the ACM, Information Fusion, NeuroImage, Human Brain Mapping, and Science China, and has been granted more than 10 invention patents at home and abroad.

Since his appointment as a Distinguished Professor by BJUT in 1997, Prof. Zhong has been committed to promoting the University's international academic exchanges and cooperation. Based on the Faculty of Information Technology, he established the Beijing International Collaboration Base on Brain Informatics and Wisdom Services. The base has undertaken a number of international cooperation and exchange projects funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), greatly enhancing the influence of BJUT in the field of artificial intelligence. Moreover, Prof. Zhong has collaborated with other faculty members in BJUT to cultivate over 20 Ph.D students and 50-plus graduates and mentored many young faculty members, making important contributions to talent cultivation in the University.

The Engineering Academy of Japan (EAJ) was established in 1987. EAJ members are elected from leading experts from academia, industry, and government institutions who possess a wide range of knowledge and have made outstanding contributions in engineering and technological sciences, and closely related fields. EAJ currently has 828 individual Japanese members and 47 foreign associates. It is a member of the International Council of Academies of Engineering and Technological Sciences (CAETS) since 1990 and has significant international academic influence.