Jian Zhao

Director of the Multimedia Cognitive Learning Laboratory and Senior Research Scientist at China Telecom Artificial Intelligence Research Institute

Jian Zhao is the director of the EVOL (Multimedia Cognitive Learning) Lab at China Telecom’s Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (TeleAI), and a senior research scientist working under Professor Xuelong Li, who serves as CTO and Chief Scientist of China Telecom Group and Director of the AI Research Institute. He received his Ph.D. in 2019 from the National University of Singapore, supervised by Professor Shuicheng Yan. His research focuses primarily on AI for critical security scenarios and AI governance. He has published 41 papers in CCF-A level international journals and conferences. As first author, his representative works include 2 papers in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI, impact factor 20.8), 3 papers in International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV, impact factor 11.6), and a paper in ACM MM, which received the only Best Student Paper Award (1 out of 208) in 2018. He is also the first inventor of 5 granted national invention patents. His work has been cited over 4,900 times on Google Scholar, with an H-index of 40 and an i10-index of 67. He was selected for the first cohort of the Central SOEs (State-Owned Enterprises) Leading Tech Talent Program, where he served as class president and temporary Party branch secretary. He has also been recognized in the Young Talent Support Program by the China Association for Science and Technology and the Beijing Association for Science and Technology. He has led or participated in seven projects, including NSFC General Programs and defense-related ministry-level projects. His research achievements have been adopted by several important national agencies and applied in seven leading tech enterprises including China Telecom, generating notable impact. He has received numerous awards, including the 2023 Wu Wenjun Outstanding Youth Award in Artificial Intelligence from the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence, the 2022 First Prize of the Wu Wenjun AI Natural Science Award (ranked 2nd among five recipients), the 2019 Lee Hwee Kuan Award from the Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence Association (PREMIA) in Singapore (1 of 6 recipients), and has won first place in eight major national and international AI competitions. He currently serves as a board member of the Beijing Society of Image and Graphics and as an editorial board member of the international journal Pattern Recognition.