A*STAR · SINGAPORE MANAGEMENT UNIVERSITY
Joey
Tianyi Zhou.
Making agentic AI systems more efficient,
trustworthy, and capable.
Head of Applied AI Systems & Agents Chapter, A*STAR
Tenured Associate Professor · SMU

01 / ABOUT
From research
to real-world AI.
I work at the intersection of AI efficiency, robustness, and agentic systems.
As the Head of the Applied AI Systems & Agents Chapter at the Institute of Advanced Intelligence and Computing (IAIC), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), I drive the development of the A*STAR Agentic AI platform. I lead the development of AgentOS, an agentic AI platform that supports agentic transformation across Singapore’s research institutions and helps enterprises capture, organize, and preserve institutional knowledge. I also serve as Deputy Director at the Centre for Frontier AI Research (CFAR). I am also heading AI Engineering & Platform at the National Applied AI Centre of Excellence (CoE), driving the adoption of Agentic AI across companies in Singapore. Concurrently, I am also a tenured Associate Professor of Computer Science at Singapore Management University (SMU). I obtained my Ph.D. from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, in 2015. Prior to my current roles at A*STAR, I worked as a Senior Research Engineer at the Sony US Research Center in San Jose, California.
My research explores how to improve AI efficiency and robustness from a data perspective: building models that use less computation and training data, and remain reliable under perturbations and distribution shifts.
OPEN OPPORTUNITIES
Build the next
generation of AI.
I welcome Ph.D. students, research fellows, scientists, interns, and visiting scholars interested in AI and agentic systems.
Let’s work together ↗Join the group
Ph.D. scholarships are available through SMU and A*STAR. Strong coding and problem-solving skills are preferred for research positions in agentic AI.
Scholarships & visiting opportunities
Joint Ph.D. visits through ARAP and internships through CIARE or ARIA are welcome. Visiting students, including CSC students from China, may be hosted at SMU or A*STAR.
- SMU PhD Scholarships: SMU Ph.D Scholarship, Vingroup Young Talent Scholarship (For Vietnamese Students only), SMU-China Scholarship Council (CSC) Joint Scholarship Scheme, AISG Ph.D Scholarship,
- A*STAR PhD Scholarships: ARAP, ACIS, SRAP (with ANU).
- Master and undergraduate Scholarships: SIPGA
- Interns: CIARE, ARIA.
Students & visiting scholars
- Ph.D students: Heng Zhao (USTC, BSc; NTU, MSc; 2021 Intake), Yinjie Zhao (NTU, BENG; ACIS scholarship, 2023 Intake), Cheng Shen (UCI, BSc; NYU, MSc; SINGA scholarship, 2023 Intake), Zhiya Tan (SCUT, BA, 2024 Intake)
- Interns and Visiting Scholars:~30 students/scholars
02 / RESEARCH
Publications & ideas.
Efficient learning. Reliable intelligence.
More capable foundation models and agents.
58 publications
Unrestricted Targeted Deep Hashing Attack via Contrastive Latent Diffusion.
in IJCAI/ECAI 2026
AEGIS: Authenticity Evaluation Benchmark for AI-Generated Video Sequences.
in ACM Multimedia 2025
STADe: Sensory Temporal Action Detection via Temporal-Spectral Representation Learning.
in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) 2025
Democratizing Federated WiFi-Based Human Activity Recognition Using Hypothesis Transfer.
in IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC) 2024
Evolution-aware VAriance (EVA) Coreset Selection for Medical Image Classification.
in ACM Multimedia 2024
Guest Editorial Special Issue on Resource Sustainable Computational and Artificial Intelligence.
in IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence 2024
DifFormer: Multi-Resolutional Differencing Transformer With Dynamic Ranging for Time Series Analysis.
in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) 2023
Meta Knowledge Condensation for Federated Learning.
in ICLR 2023
Sequential Subset Matching for Dataset Distillation.
in NeurIPS 2023
Temporal Sentence Grounding in Videos: A Survey and Future Directions.
in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) 2023
Trusted Multi-View Classification With Dynamic Evidential Fusion.
in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) 2023
dugMatting: Decomposed-Uncertainty-Guided Matting.
in ICML 2023
Feature Selection With Multi-Source Transfer.
in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology 2022
Locality-Aware Crowd Counting.
in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) 2022
Person Re-Identification With Hierarchical Discriminative Spatial Aggregation.
in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security 2022
Sharpness-Aware Training for Free.
in NeurIPS 2022
Utility Optimal Thread Assignment and Resource Allocation in Multi-Server Systems.
in IEEE Transactions on Networking (TON) 2022
XAI Beyond Classification: Interpretable Neural Clustering.
in Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) 2022
Dual Adversarial Transfer for Sequence Labeling.
in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) 2021
PointBA: Towards Backdoor Attacks in 3D Point Cloud.
in ICCV 2021
Trusted Multi-View Classification.
in ICLR 2021
Attention-Driven Loss for Anomaly Detection in Video Surveillance.
in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology 2020
RoSeq: Robust Sequence Labeling.
in IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems 2020
A deep learning framework for Hybrid Heterogeneous Transfer Learning.
in Artificial Intelligence 2019
AnomalyNet: An Anomaly Detection Network for Video Surveillance.
in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security 2019
Learning With Annotation of Various Degrees.
in IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems 2019
Multi-class Heterogeneous Domain Adaptation.
in Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) 2019
N-ary decomposition for multi-class classification.
in Machine Learning 2019
SC2Net: Sparse LSTMs for Sparse Coding.
in AAAI 2018
Transfer Hashing: From Shallow to Deep.
in IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems 2018
Transfer Hashing with Privileged Information.
in IJCAI 2016
Heterogeneous Domain Adaptation for Multiple Classes.
in AISTATS 2014
Multi-view Positive and Unlabeled Learning.
in Asian Conference on Machine Learning (ACML) 2012
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03 / COMMUNITY
Academic service.
Associate Editor/Editorial Board
- 2025-present International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV)
- 2024-present Artificial Intelligence Journal(AIJ)
- 2022-present IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence (TETCI)
- 2020-2023 IET Image Processing
- 2019-2023 IEEE Access
Senior/Area Chair
Programme Chair/Organising Committee
- Programme Chair, International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN 2027)
- Associate Programme Chair, the 34th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2025)
- Industry Programme Chair, International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN 2025)
- Workshop Chair, The 2024 IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IEEE CAI 2024)
- 2020-present, International Workshop on Efficient Artificial Intelligence For Edge Computing (EAI) at ICDCS
Proposal Expert Panel
- Expert Panel in the Ministry of Education (MOE) Academic Research Fund.
Membership
- IEEE Senior Member
- INNS Member, AICI Section Technical Coordinator
- EAI Distinguished Member
04 / RECOGNITION
Awards & distinctions.
- 2026 World's Highly Ranked Scholars (Top 0.05%)
- 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference: Youth Outstanding Paper Award Nomination
- 2025 World's Top 2% Scientists (Career Lifetime)
- 2024 ACM MM Best Paper Nomination
- 2022 IEEE SmartCity Best Paper
- 2020 National Research Foundation Fellow (NRF-F) Finalist
- 2019 IEEE Innovation Spotlight Paper
- 2019 ICCV Hands Challenge: Runner-up Prize
- 2019 BOOM workshop on IJCAI: Best Paper Award
- 2017 NeurIPS Best Reviewer
- 2016 BeyondLabeler workshop on IJCAI: Best Paper Award
- 2016 ECCV Best Student Paper Nomination
05 / SUPPORT
Research funding.
- Digital Trust Centre Innovation Grant (No:DTC-IGC-02): Reassemble Data Before Sharing: Innovative Privacy-Preserved Data-Sharing Solutions for Cloud Services, PI, Jul. 15 2025 - Jul. 14 2026
- RIE2025 Singapore-Japan Joint Grant (No:R24I6IR133): Breaking Multimodal Correspondence: Crafting Safer and Fairer Multimodal AIGC, PI, Apr. 1 2025 - 31 Mar. 2028
- AISG 2024 Research Grant (No. AISG3-RP-2024-033): Sequential Deepfake Attribution, PI, 06 Jan. 2025- 05 Jan. 2028
- National Multimodal LLM Programme (No. AISG-NMLP-2024-003): Privacy^2: Fine-Tuning Encapsulated LLMs to Downstream Tasks Without Peeking on Private Data, Co-PI, 01 Apr. 2025- 31 Mar. 2028
- A*STAR Central Research Funding: Tiny Machine Learning, PI, 2020-2026
LET’S CONNECT
Good research starts
with a conversation.
- A*STAR Email: zhouty@a-star.edu.sg
- SMU Email: tyzhou@smu.edu.sg