Disclaimer statement: The views and opinions expressed herein are strictly those of the page author or organization. The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by Mississippi State University. H. Wang Ph.D.

Systems Intelligence and Optimization Lab (SIOL)

Haifeng Wang

Associate Professor, Co-Graduate Coordinator
McCain Hall, Room 260P
Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Bagley College of Engineering, Mississippi State University (MSU)
PO Box 9542, Mississippi State, MS 39762
✉: wang [at] ise.msstate.edu
☎: (662) 325 3923
See also: Google Scholar, ResearchGate, Linkedin, MSU Profile

My research studies machine learning and optimization methods for addressing challenges of high data heterogeneity and model interpretability in complex engineering problems, such as medical image-based diseases analysis, neurological disorder diagnosis, precision agriculture, smart electronics manufacturing, smart warehouse, and other big data applications. I am particularly interested in understanding the algorithmic and statistical properties of machine learning models through both empirical (data-driven methods to develop tools for solving practical problems) and methodological (optimization theories to advance our understanding of machine learning fundamentals) studies.

Recently, my work is focused on 1) developing interpretable machine learning tools to understand extracapsular extension in head and neck cancer treatment, 2) transfer learning and domain adaptation in woodchip quality evaluation, and 3) pattern recognition from multi-channel multi-modal biometric signals.

I joined MSU Industrial and Systems Engineering department as an Assistant Professor (2019.08–2025.08) and have been serving as an Associate Professor since 2025.08. I am also an affiliated faculty at the Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems (CAVS) and University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) Department of Radiation Oncology.

I obtained my Ph.D. and M.S. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 2019 and 2015, respectively, as advised by Dr. Sang Won Yoon. I also hold a B.S. degree in Industrial Engineering from Southeast University in Nanjing, China.

From 2014 to 2019, I was a research associate working on the following research projects sponsored by different industry partners under the Integrated Electronics Engineering Center (IEEC) and Watson Institute of Systems Excellence (WISE) at Binghamton University:

Since joining the MSU faculty, my research has been generously supported by NIH, USDA, the Mississippi Department of Employment Security (MDES), MSU Office of Research and Economic Development (ORED), and the MSU Strategic Research Initiative (SRI) Faculty Seed Funding Program.

[third person bio]

☑ Research Area


📰 News

  • Congratulations! PhD student Amirhossein Eskorouchi has led a team that has been selected as a finalist in the 2026 IISE DAIS Mobile/Web App Challenge. Web App Title: Wood-Chip Monitor: An Edge Artificial Intelligence for Wood Chip Quality Evaluation; Team Members: Amirhossein Eskorouchi, Dongmin Ethan Kang, Abhro Shome Pias
  • Congratulations! PhD student Abhro Shome Pias won the 2nd Place at the Poster Presentation, Engineering Section, Graduate Research Symposium Spring 2026
  • Congratulations! PhD student Abhro Shome Pias has led a team that has been selected as a finalist in the 2026 IISE DAIS Mobile/Web App Challenge. Web App Title: PlantLife365: A Multimodal Internet-of-Things Web App for Plant Health Monitoring; Team Members: Abhro Shome Pias, Dongmin Ethan Kang, Niraj Ghimire, Amirhossein Eskorouchi
  • Congrats! Our team received a fund from Sun Grant USDA NIFA, project title "Design and Field Validation of a Portable Edge-AI System for Forest Biomass Quality Assessment"
  • Check the recent released talk in The Biomedical & Life Sciences Collection from Henry Stewart Talk: Integration of machine learning with biomedical data
  • Check our work on AI-based small-sized dense object detection in woodchip size evaluation application. Check the demo
  • Congrats! Our work about Development of Machine-Learning Assisted Continuous Fiber Deposition for Multi-Material Additive Manufacturing is funded by NSF.
  • Congrats! Our work about Enhancing Forest Product Curricula in AI via Experiential Learning is funded by USDA-NIFA.
  • Congrats! Our work about Developing an Automated Preparation Technology for Skewering Operations in Meat and Seafood Kebab Production is funded by USDA-NIFA.
  • Congratulations to Dr. Abdur Rahman on successfully defending his Ph.D. thesis! It has been an absolute pleasure working with him over the past four years. I'm incredibly proud of all that he has accomplished. This August, he will be joining the Louisiana Tech University Industrial Engineering Program as an Assistant Professor (tenure-track).
  • Glad to share that I have been promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure (effective August 2025)! It’s been a rewarding journey, and I’m deeply grateful for the support and encouragement from my collaborators, colleagues, students, and family. Thank you all for being part of this path. There’s still a long way to go, and I look forward to the next chapter!
  • Exciting News! A team formed by students from our lab has been selected as a finalist in the 2025 IISE/DAIS Data Analytics Competition. Congratulations to the team members: Abdur Rahman, Amirhossein Eskorouchi, and Manideep Kolla on this well-deserved recognition. Wish you the best in the final round!
  • Congrats! Our work about AI-assisted soybean disease diagnosis has been funded by the Mississippi Soybean Promotion Board.
  • Big congratulations to Ph.D. student Abdur Rahman on his induction into the 2025 Bagley College of Engineering Student Hall of Fame class. Check the news
  • It is my great honor to be recognized as the recipient of the 2025 New Faculty Researcher Award by the American Society for Engineering Education Southeastern Section (ASEE-SE). News
  • A great pleasure to serve as a Guest Editor on IISE Transactions on Healthcare Systems Engineering journal for a Special Issue on ``Recent Advances of Artificial Intelligence Innovations in Health Systems Engineering." Welcome to submit your recent work to the issue. Deadline for manuscript submissions: 01 August 2025
  • I am deeply honored to be recognized as the 2025 MAS Early Career Award recipient by the Mississippi Academy of Sciences (MAS). News, Maroon MEMO Many thanks to my students, colleagues, collaborators, and family for your incredible support, and a special thanks to MAS for this recognition. I truly appreciate it!

    2024

  • Congrats! Our work about Research and Extension Experiences for Undergraduates (REEU): AI-enabled Industrial Solutions for Forest Products (AI2F) is funded by USDA-NIFA.
  • Congratulations to PhD student Abdur Rahman for securing first place in the oral presentation category at MSU’s Fall Graduate Research Symposium! His presentation, titled “Integrating Texture Features and Domain Adaptation for Robust Moisture Content Prediction in Wood Chips,” highlights research currently supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
  • Great honor to have been invited as the 2024 Bakowski Visiting Professor to present our work at the Feist-Weiller Cancer Center at LSU Health Shreveport.
  • I will join the Board of Directors in the Quality Control and Reliability Engineering (QCRE) Division of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) starting in June 2024. A great pleasure to serve the QCRE community.
  • A great pleasure to join Scientific Data's Editorial Board. Scientific Data - Nature is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal published by Nature Research since 2014. With impact factor 9.55 (2023), it is a prestigious journal focusing on descriptions of datasets, and research that advances the sharing and reuse of scientific data.
  • Congrats! PhD student Abdur Rahman, his paper has been selected as a finalist for the IISE DAIS Division Best Student Paper Competition. The paper is titled "Boosting Discriminability of Transferable Features in Unsupervised Domain Adaptation." This is a wonderful honor for a student paper - Congratulations!
  • Congrats! Our work related to AI-assisted plant disease diagnosis has been funded by the Mississippi Soybean Promotion Board.
  • A great pleasure for serving as a 2024 NSF Panel Reviewer.

    2023

  • The Data Descriptor for the published brain MRI dataset is now available in Scientific Data journal.
  • Excited to be invited to USDA NIFA review panel.
  • A great pleasure to join the NSF review panel.
  • Congrats! Our review paper about ``Wood chip moisture content assessment and prediction" has been published in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews journal.
  • I will serve as a Guest Editor of Information Journal, Special Issue ``From Data to Diagnosis: Recent Advances of Machine Learning in Biomedical and Health Informatics." We welcome your submissions. Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 August 2024
  • A great pleasure to serve as a Guest Editor of Mathematics Journal, Special Issue ``Computational Intelligence in Addressing Data Heterogeneity." Welcome to submit your recent work to the issue. Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 September 2024
  • Excited to be invited to join NIH review panel meeting in November.
  • Congrats! An NIH grant has been awarded for our work on Interpretable Deep Learning for Head and Neck Cancer Evaluation. This multidisciplinary project, led by both MSU and UMMC, is a fruitful collaboration between engineering and medical professionals. I would like to acknowledge the support of the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department of the Bagley College of Engineering at MSU, as well as the Radiation Oncology and Radiology Departments at UMMC. Their support is essential for the success of this grant.
  • Congrats! Our recent research about Robust Unsupervised Domain Adaptation has been published in Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics.
  • Three lab members have successfully defended their doctoral dissertations. Congratulations to Dr. Yibin Wang, Dr. Wesley Chorney, and Dr. Fatine Elakramine. Yibin will be a PostDoc at Michigan State University starting in fall 2023.
  • A great pleasure to participate in the 2023 MPS Workshop for Young Investigators in Alexandria, VA. Many thanks to the organizers, The University of Florida and NSF.
  • Congrats! Undergraduate Research Assistant Ethan Kang (research topic biometric signal processing)received BCoE Undergraduate Student Research Award.
  • Our data about Brain Tumor Recurrence Prediction are now available in The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA). This is a collaborative work by both UMMC Department of Radiation Oncology and MSU Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. Thank you all the team members for the hard work.
  • Our work titled "Preoperative Prediction and Identification of Extracapsular Extension in Head and Neck Cancer Patients: Progress and Potential" has been published in the Cureus Journal of Medical Science.
  • Congrats! PhD student Abdur Rahman's work “An Interpretable Deep Learning Model for Wood Chip Moisture Content Prediction” is awarded 3rd position in Engineering PhD category in the Graduate Research Symposium, Spring 2023.
    See More

    2022

  • Congrats! Our work about Real-time Collaborative Machine Learning for Plant Disease Diagnosis Intelligence is funded by MSU-MAFES Special Research Initiative.
  • Congrats! Our paper about Embedded Machine Learning Model for Early Detection and Intervention of High-Risk ICU Readmission Patients has been accepted by IEEE International Conference in Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM) (acceptance rate 20%).
  • Congrats! Lab member PhD student Abdur's paper about Deep Learning-based Weed Detection for Cotton has been published in Smart Agricultural Technology journal.
  • A great honor to be invited to give a seminar talk to the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering at Iowa State University.
  • Excited to be invited to join NIH Emerging Imaging Technologies and Applications (EITA) Panel meeting.
  • A great pleasure to organize AI in Radiation Oncology Seminar and welcome the visitors from UMMC Department of Radiation Oncology. Thanks to all the participants for all the great talks.
  • Congratulations! Our research related to image-based machine learning in wood industry got funded by USDA-NIFA.
  • Congrats! PhD students Abdur and Yibin's work about activation function optimization has been selected as a finalist to the 2022 IISE QCRE/ProcessMiner Data Challenge Competition. Congratulations on this achievement! The work title: Exponential Error Linear Unit (EELU): Optimization-Boosted Activation Function Series for Image Classification.
  • Organized a mini symposium (MS) session about Machine Learning Advances in Healthcare Systems in the The Second International Conference in Computational Methods and Applications in Engineering.
  • PhD student Abdur Rahman won the 1st place in the MSU Spring 2022 Graduate Research Symposium - Engineering Section. His topic is Activation Function Optimization Scheme for Image Classification. Congrats!
  • Organized the 2022 IISE DAIS Data Analytics Competition. This year's topic is about brain tumor progression prediction based on the current radiation therapy.
  • Organized the 2022 IISE Best Student Paper Competition in the DAIS division.
  • Our research paper about the Dynamic Brain Network has been accepted by IEEE ICHI 2022.
  • Congratulations to Zach for successfully defending his Master's thesis, titled: Improving Deep Neural Network Training with Batch Size and Learning Rate Optimization for Head and Neck Tumor Segmentation on CT and PET Medical Images on March 4th, 2022. Zach will join LinkedIn as a Machine Learning Engineer Apprentice. Congratulations, Zach!

    2021

  • Our research paper about Deep Neural Network Architecture Optimization has been accepted by Applied Soft Computing.
  • Our research paper about Multi-scale 3D Dense Neural Network has been accepted by the 12th ACM Conference in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics.
  • Dr. Wang will join the Board of Directors in the Data Analytics and Information Systems (DAIS) Division of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) starting in June 2021. A great pleasure to serve the DAIS community.
  • Our research paper about Attention Mechanism in Convolutional Neural Network has been accepted by Expert Systems with Applications.
  • Our poster presentations Artificial intelligence-based extracapsular extension prediction in head and neck cancer analysis and Retinal disease diagnosis through an adaptive deep learning model are available online in the Clinical Cancer Research journal.
  • Our research paper about Wavelet-based Recurrent Neural Network has been accepted by Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing journal.

    2020

  • Congrats! Our research "Leveraging Immersive Virtual Reality Technology to Perform Nurse Training in the State of Mississippi" is funded by the Mississippi Department of Employment Security.
  • Congrats! Our research paper entitled "Brain Functional Connectivity Pattern Recognition for Attention-deficit/hyperactivity Disorder Diagnosis" has been accepted and invited to the Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Medical Informatics (MABM 2020) workshop at IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics & Biomedicine (BIBM 2020).
  • Good news! Our research paper "A Bayesian Optimization-Based Augmented Attention Neural Network for Efficient Rice Diseases Detection" has been invited for the presentation at the 15th INFORMS Virtual Workshop on Data Mining and Decision Analytics.
  • Congrats! Our conference paper (first author Yibin Wang, Ph.D. student) entitled "An Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Model for Cell Detection on Stimulated Ramen Scattering Images" is selected as one of the four finalists for the Data Analytics and Information Systems (DAIS) Division Best Paper Competition at the IISE annual conference in November at New Orleans.
  • Congrats! Our conference paper (first author Christian Zamiela, Master's student) was awarded 2nd place for oral presentation at the 36th Southern Biomedical Engineering Conference (SBEC). The paper titled “A Comparative Study on Data Mining Techniques for Breast Cancer Survivability Prediction.”
  • Congrats! Our journal paper was accepted by Neurocomputing. Title: A 1-norm regularized linear programming nonparallel hyperplane support vector machine for binary classification problems.

    2019

  • Dr. Wang is selected as one of the six panelists for the 2019 INFORMS Academic Job Search panel. The panel aims to provide prospective job-seekers with advice to help them make an informed career choice, avoid pitfalls, and prepare for the next step in their academic job search.
  • Congrats! Our journal paper related to deep learning-based 3D medical image analysis is published online in IISE Transactions on Healthcare Systems Engineering in September 2019. Title: A deep separable neural network for human tissue identification in three-dimensional optical coherence tomography images.
  • Congrats! Our journal paper related to real-time stencil printing process optimization is published online in IEEE Transactions on Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology in August 2019. Title: Real-time stencil printing process optimization using a hybrid multi-layer online sequential extreme learning machine and evolutionary search approach.
  • Dr. Wang joined the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering as an assistant professor at Mississippi State University in August, 2019. A great pleasure to be part of MSU-ISE family. Check us: https://www.ise.msstate.edu

    • ☑ Lab Members

    ☑ Publications

    See also my Google Scholar profile.

    ☑ Grants/Projects*

    *E: External; F: Federal; S: State; I: Internal

    ☑ Teaching

    ☑ Services

    Professional events: I am serving/have served on the Session Chairs of the following conferences/workshops:
    I have also served as a reviewer for different journals (list some of them here):

    ☑ GoodReads