Professional Title: Professor
Bowen Zhou is a Chair Professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University, Director and Chief Scientist of the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Founder of Frontis.ai. A recipient of the State Council Special Allowance and the Wu Wenjun Award for Outstanding Contribution to Artificial Intelligence, he is an IEEE Fellow and CAAI Fellow. He is an IEEE Fellow and CAAI Fellow.
Professor Zhou has extensive experience in fundamental AI research, the development of core AI technologies, and their real-world industrial applications. His research spans artificial general intelligence (AGI), large language models, deep learning, natural language processing (NLP), AI safety, AI alignment, and AI for Science. As of August 2026, he has published more than 200 papers, which have received over 31,000 citations in total.
In the field of NLP, Professor Zhou was among the early researchers to explore structured self-attention and sentence representation. He developed a structured self-attention mechanism with multi-head information fusion for natural language representation，the approach anticipated some of the key ideas later embodied in the Transformer architecture. The representative paper, “A Structured Self-Attentive Sentence Embedding,” was published at ICLR 2017 and has received more than 3,100 citations.
Professor Zhou also contributed to the development of two widely influential neural text summarization models, covering both abstractive and extractive approaches. The corresponding papers, “Abstractive Text Summarization Using Sequence-to-Sequence RNNs and Beyond” and “SummaRuNNer: A Recurrent Neural Network Based Sequence Model for Extractive Summarization of Documents,” have received more than 5,200 citations combined.
Work ExperienceEducational ExperienceShanghai AI Lab , Director , Chief Scientist
Frontis.ai , Founder
JD.com Group , Senior Vice President of JD.com Group, Chairman of the Technology Committee of JD.com Group, President of JD Cloud & AI, and Founding Dean of JD AI Research Institute
IBM Research & Watson Group , 院长 , IBM Research: Research Scientist to Director; Watson Group: Chief Scientist
University of Science and Technology of China , Electronic Information Engineering , University graduated , Bachelor's degree
Chinese Academy of Sciences , Information and Signal Processing , Postgraduate (Master's Degree) , Master's degree
University of Colorado, USA , Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering , With Certificate of Graduation for Doctorate Study , Doctoral degree
Social AffiliationsDirector and Chief Scientist of Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Vice Chairman of the Artificial Intelligence Standardization Technical Committee of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology
Member, Science and Technology Education Committee, National Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Ministry of Education
Founder, Frontis.ai
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Scientific Research
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Honors and Titles