Dr. Zhi Yan is currently a teacher-researcher of computer science at ENSTA - Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France. From 2017 to 2024, he was an Assistant Professor of computer science and a Referent for open science at the Université de technologie de Belfort Montbéliard (UTBM), France. From 2016 to 2017, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Lincoln Centre for Autonomous Systems (L-CAS) at the University of Lincoln, UK, mainly working on the Horizon 2020 project FLOBOT, but also involved in the Horizon 2020 project ENRICHME. From 2013 to 2015, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in software engineering for mobile robotics in the CAR Team at the École des Mines de Douai, France. From 2009 to 2012, he was a Ph.D. student in multi-robot systems in the Laboratoire d'Intelligence Artificielle de Saint-Denis (LIASD, founded in 1969) at the Université Paris 8. He has been a visiting scholar at TU Wien (Austria), CTU (Czechia), Hunan University (China), and Central South University (China). As the first or co-first author, one of his papers was ranked among the “ESI Top 1% Highly Cited Papers”, and another was named the “Best Paper of 2020” by the journal Intelligent Service Robotics.