Liu Sifeng


Liu Sifeng is an expert on grey system theory and is currently the Director of Institute for Grey Systems Studies at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China. He obtained his Masters and PhD from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan.
He is IEEE Fellow and Co-Chair of the committee on grey systems at IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society.

Academic career

He was the doctoral student of Julong Deng, the founder of Grey System Theory. He is Honorary Fellow of the World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics and Editor of Grey Systems: Theory and Application, and The Journal of Grey System, a Science Citation Index publication from UK. From December 2014 to December 2016, Liu worked as a Research Professor with Prof. Yingjie Yang at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. Liu obtained his MS in Economics and PhD in Systems Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China. He was a visiting professor at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania in 1996-97, where he worked with Jeffrey Yi-Lin Forrest.

Scientific contributions

In 2002, one of his papers was recognized by the World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics as one of the best papers of its 12th International Congress. His book “Grey System Theory and Its Applications” was identified as the No. 1 top cited book in the pandect of natural science by China National Knowledge Infrastructure in 2017 and has also been ranked as top 10 best-selling books of Electronics and Information field, top 10 most cited books in Economics, and the 8th edition is selected to the Series for High-Quality Books by Famous Scholars by Science Press in 2017. The h-index of Liu is 61 and i10-index is 407, and his total citations are over 26130 till October 2017.
On one of Liu's book, the renowned French cyberneticist Robert Vallée commented "a remarkable contribution to the development and applications of systems science." In 2018, Nature Index, the news outlet of Nature Publishing, quoted a study co-authored by Liu and demonstrated that the research output gap between China and USA is reducing.
Liu and his team proposed various grey models that substitute statistical methods of data analysis at small sample size. In one of his studies published in Scientometrics he demonstrated that Grey NDGM model's performance was better than that of Regression analysis.

Recognition and Awards

At the completion of the EU-funded Marie Curie Actions project: Grey Systems and Its Application to Data Mining and Decision Support, Professor Liu was selected as one of the 10 shortlisted promising scientists in the MSCA 2017 Prizes. In January 2019, Chairman Huai Jinpeng, the renowned Chinese scientist, former Deputy Minister of Information Technology, and a deputy of the 12th National People's Congress, sent a letter to Liu and commended his services for Grey System Theory, which originated in China. In the letter Chairman Huai appreciated him and his research group for "actively participating in the work of the International Association of Grey Systems and Uncertainty Analysis and assuming leadership positions, contributing to the deep participation of Chinese scientists in global science and technology governance."
On September 7, 2019, German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Wuhan and delivered a speech at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology. In her speech, Merkel highlighted the influence of Grey System Theory and its pioneers. In her speech, she said that the works of Professor Deng Julong, the founder of grey system theory, and Professor Liu Sifeng, “have made a profound impact on the world.”

Selected works