In April 2002 he received the title of Professor from the President of Poland,
Mr. Alexander Kwasniewski.
In December 2002 he acted as advisor of Lech Walesa, a former President of
Poland and a Nobel Prize winner, when Lech Walesa was awarded honorary Ph.D. from the University of
North Carolina at Charlotte, USA. In 2006 he was appointed a Business Ambassador
for the State of South Australia. In December 2013 he was awarded (by the President of Poland, Mr. Bronislaw Komorowski)
the Order of the Rebirth of Polish Polonia Restituta - the second highest Polish state decoration civilian
(after the Order of the White Eagle), awarded for outstanding achievements in the field of education, science,
sports, culture, arts, economy, national defense, social activities, the civil service and the development of
good relations with other countries.
His current research interests are in the
field of machine learning and evolutionary computation. He has published several books, including a monograph
"Genetic Algorithms + Data Structures =
Evolution Programs" (3 editions, a few translations), and over 250
technical papers in journals and conference proceedings. He was one of
the editors-in-chief of the
"Handbook of Evolutionary Computation".
He was the general chairman of the First IEEE International Conference
on Evolutionary Computation held in Orlando, June 1994. He has been an
invited speaker of many international conferences and a member of 40
various program committees of international conferences during the
last couple of years of his academic career. Until his retirement he has been member of editorial boards and/or
served as associate editor on 12 international journals. He also
published (together with David B. Fogel) a text on modern
heuristic methods (2 editions, the second one from 2004),
"How to Solve It: Modern Heuristics", which is a standard text on
hundreds of universities all over the world (Chinese translation of
the book appeared in 2003, Polish translation appeared in
2006, and Greek translation appeared in 2013). More recent books include
"Winning Credibility: A guide for building
a business from rags to riches" (written with Matthew Michalewicz),
"Adaptive Business Intelligence" (written with Martin Schmidt, Matthew Michalewicz, and Constantin Chiriac),
and
"Puzzle-Based Learning: An introduction to
critical thinking, mathematics, and problem solving" (written with Matthew Michalewicz).
The newest book, "A Guide to Teaching Puzzle-based Learning"
(written with Ed Meyer, Nick Falkner, and Raja Sooriamurthi) appeared by Springer in August 2014.
He received the 2019 IEEE CIS Evolutionary Computation Pioneer award which recognises his significant contributions
to early concepts and sustained developments in the field of evolutionary computation.
Zbigniew has secured numerous multi-million dollar industry contracts from companies such as General
Motors, Ford Motor Company, Bank of America, U.S. Department of Defense, AirLiquide, PKN Orlen, BB&T,
and Dentsu, and his scientific and business achievements have been recognized by many invited
talks and publications, including TIME Magazine, Newsweek, New York Times, Forbes, Business Journal,
and the Associated Press among others. Until August 2012, Zbigniew served as the Chief Scientist and
the Chairman of the Board of SolveIT Software, a technology company he
co-founded with Constantin Chiriac and Matthew Michalewicz. The company had been using leading Computational
Intelligence methods to address complex business problems for large corporations and government agencies and
was acquired
by Schneider Electric. In July 2014 he co-founded a new company, Complexica, where he serves as
the Chief Scientist.
The company helps large organisations sell more products and services,
and reduce their labour costs and headcount through the use of automated analytics.
