CV

education, positions, publication summary, honors, advising, teaching and service.

Contact Information

Name Tianyi Zhou
Professional Title Visiting Assistant Professor, MBZUAI
Email tianyi.david.zhou@gmail.com
Website https://tianyizhou.github.io

Professional Summary

Machine learning and natural language processing — LLMs and multimodal models, mixture-of-experts, interactive agents, and human–AI–world alignment. 20k+ citations, h-index 65; listed among Stanford’s World’s Top 2% Scientists in 2024, 2025 and 2026.

Experience

  • 2026 - present

    Abu Dhabi, UAE

    Visiting Assistant Professor
    Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI)
  • 2024 - 2025

    College Park, MD

    Independent Researcher
  • 2022 - 2024

    College Park, MD

    Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science
    University of Maryland, College Park
  • 2021 - 2022

    Seattle, WA

    Visiting Research Scientist
    Google LLC

Education

Research Fields

Areas: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing
Focus: LLMs & multimodal models, mixture-of-experts, interactive agents, human–AI–world alignment

Publication Summary

Citations: 20,128 total; h-index 65; i10-index 182
Recognition: World's Top 2% Scientists by Stanford since 2024
Venues: 20 NeurIPS, 22 ICML, 24 ICLR, 18 ACL, 12 EMNLP, 7 NAACL, 8 COLM, 5 AAAI, 5 IJCAI, 4 KDD, 3 ICCV, 4 CVPR, 4 ECCV; 17 journal papers in IEEE TPAMI / TIP / TNNLS / TKDE, Machine Learning Journal, TMLR, WWW, DMKD
Full list: by year · by topic

Honors and Awards

Advising

Ph.D. students (UMD): 14 — 2 graduated, 12 in progress; including an Apple Scholar 2026 (Ming Li) and a UMD Flagship Fellow 2025 (Dongping Chen)
Master's students (UMD): 4, of whom 3 graduated
Mentoring: 20+ Ph.D. and master's students at other universities

Teaching

CMSC 421 (Undergraduate), Fall 2022 & Fall 2023: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, University of Maryland — updated the curriculum with deep neural networks, large language models and optional research projects
CMSC 828A (Graduate), Spring 2023 & Spring 2024: Fantastic Machine Learning Paradigms and Where to Use Them, University of Maryland — developed the whole course, project topics and reading list from scratch
AI7102 (Graduate), Spring 2026: Introduction to Deep Learning, MBZUAI

Institutional Service

UMD CS: Field Committee in Artificial Intelligence (2023–2024)
UMD CS: Graduate Admissions Committee (2023, 2025)
Community: Award Committee, 2024 Rising Stars in Machine Learning

Professional Service

Area Chair: NeurIPS 2025, 2026 · ICML 2026 · ICLR 2025, 2026 · ACL 2025, 2026 · EMNLP 2025, 2026 · AAAI 2021, 2026 (SPC) · IJCAI 2023, 2025 · SIGKDD 2022 (SPC) · WACV 2022–2024 (SPC) · ICPR 2024
Organization: Student Travel Award Chair, The Web Conference (WWW) 2025