JOEY T. ZHOU.

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

Portrait of Joey Tianyi Zhou
RESEARCH / ENGINEERING / IMPACTSingapore ↗
RESEARCH FOCUSEfficient AITrustworthy AIFoundation Models & Agents

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.

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

2022

Locality-Aware Crowd Counting.

Joey Tianyi Zhou, Le Zhang, Jiawei Du, Xi Peng, Zhiwen Fang, Zhe Xiao, Hongyuan Zhu

in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) 2022

03 / COMMUNITY

Academic service.

Senior/Area Chair

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.

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.