According to Chinese media reports, Dr. Feng Yanghe, a renowned expert in command and control and artificial intelligence, and an associate professor and doctoral supervisor at the College of Systems Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, tragically passed away while carrying out a critical mission. He was 38 years old at the time of his death. Some commentators view Feng Yanghe’s passing as a major loss to the research field of the People’s Liberation Army.
On Tuesday (11th), the Feng Yanghe Funeral Work Group issued an obituary stating that Feng Yanghe had died in Beijing in the early morning hours of July 1st at 2:35 am while on a major mission. The cause of his death was not specifically mentioned, but there are reports suggesting that Feng Yanghe, after working late, took a Didi ride-hailing car in the middle of the night, which was involved in a severe accident. Many Chinese netizens believe this to be an assassination operation orchestrated by the United States.
It is understood that Feng Yanghe was one of China’s top scientists and was also known as a “genius scientist.” He was born on March 3, 1985, in Pingliang City, Gansu Province. In September 2003, he was admitted to the undergraduate program in Command Automation Engineering at the National University of Defense Technology. From 2011 to 2013, he conducted joint research at Harvard University’s Department of Statistics and the High-Performance Computing Laboratory at the University of Iowa in the United States, serving as an assistant researcher. In June 2014, after completing his doctoral studies at the National University of Defense Technology, he remained at the university as a lecturer, and subsequently held positions such as associate professor, deputy director of a provincial-level laboratory, and doctoral supervisor.
Feng Yanghe previously served as the assistant team leader of the Weapons and Equipment Artificial Intelligence Professional Group in the Equipment Development Department, secretary of the Intelligent Command and Control Group, an expert for key projects of the Science and Technology Committee of the Military Commission, a key member of the “Command and Control Organization Design and Optimization” innovation team of the Ministry of Education, a young elite talent of the National University of Defense Technology, vice chairman of the Computational Intelligence Branch of the Chinese Operations Research Society, and general secretary of the Intelligent Command and Control Systems Engineering Special Committee of the Chinese Operations Research Society.
Feng Yanghe’s main research areas included reinforcement learning, intelligent gaming, intelligent planning, wargame simulation techniques, and Bayesian theory. He made significant innovative breakthroughs in command and control and intelligent decision support. His related achievements have received second and third-class awards for military technological advancement, first-class awards from the Chinese Operations Research Society for technological advancement, and the first prize for the National University of Defense Technology’s Youth Innovation Award.
Feng Yanghe has published more than 60 papers and authored four books, with over 1,000 citations. Among them, he has published 15 SCI-indexed papers and 18 EI-indexed papers as the first author or corresponding author. He has also published two machine learning monographs as the first author and has been granted or filed 22 patents. His patents include a reinforcement learning-based method for anti-drone mission allocation, a strategy optimization method guided by trust-region cutting, and related systems, storage media, and applications.