Faculty & Research

Dr. Bowen Zhou is an Affiliate Professor at Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance (SAIF) at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He is a Hui-Yan Chair Professor and Chief Professor of the Department of Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University, as well as the founder of Frontis.ai.

Professor Zhou has devoted himself to exploring the industrial application of artificial intelligence on a global scale. His research encompasses speech recognition, natural language processing and translation, multi-modal content understanding and generation, knowledge representation and reasoning, human-computer dialogue, and trustworthy AI.

He has published more than 100 papers, with overall citation totaling more than 18,000. He has also received numerous patents both in China and the US. Notably, his groundbreaking work on multi-headed self-attention mechanism for natural language representation, published in 2016, laid a major foundation for the later Transformer architecture, receiving more than 2,000 citations from top-tier international journals such as Transformer and GAT. Meanwhile, his natural language generation algorithms have been cited for over 3,000 times in the field of AIGC. In recognition of these outstanding contributions, Professor Zhou received the prestigious “Wu Wenjun Outstanding Contribution Award in Artificial Intelligence” in December 2020.

Professor Zhou is a member of the National Expert Committee on New Generation Artificial Intelligence Governance and the Research Center of New Generation Artificial Intelligence. He has served as a member of the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Strategy Advisory Expert Committee and is also a scientific and technological advisor to the city governments of Beijing, Guangzhou, and Chengdu.

Professor Zhou also serves as an affiliated professor and advises Ph.D. students of many first-class universities such as Peking University, University of Science and Technology of China, Nanjing University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen), and Harbin Institute of Technology.

Professor Zhou has held several top technology executive positions across China and the US, overseeing technology strategy, research, development, productization, and P&L of lines of business—including cloud computing, AI, IOT, big data, and digitalization transformation. He had been the Chairman of JD Technology Committee, President of JD Cloud & AI BU, Senior Vice President of JD Group, and the founding Director of JD AI Research. Prior to joining JD.com, Professor Zhou held a 15-year tenure at IBM T. J. Watson in New York, where he most recently served as the Director of AI Foundations Lab at IBM Research Headquarters; was the Chief Scientist of IBM Watson Group; and was a Distinguished Engineer of IBM.