Bio

Chris Zhou is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the School of Innovation and the CTO of AixHealthCare Ltd., an AI-driven startup specializing in the intersection of multimodal Large Language Models (mLLMs) and human health. He holds a B.Eng. in Nuclear Technology from Fudan University and a Ph.D. from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. During his doctoral studies, he was a visiting scholar at Harvard University (2017) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2018).

Prior to his current venture, he served as an Assistant Professor of Urban Data Science at HKU (2021–2025). His research straddles advanced AI and diverse applied fields, been featured in both top-tier AI and robotics venues (e.g., ICLR, ICRA) and high-impact research journals, including Nature Computational Science, Sustainable Cities and Society, and Environmental Science & Technology, etc. Some of his recent work includes MoRA: learning human-mobility-centric spatial representations covering the entire China, optimal control of drone swarm to combat wildfires, and optimal placement of sewage testing sites to best monitor epidemic spread in cities.

Beyond research, he is a dedicated teacher and devotes much of his time and energy to mentoring student innovation projects. His students have won multiple thesis awards. From 2021 to 2025, he served as a student mentor at the HKU Innovation Academy, where he mentored the student project “Air Ring 48” – a climate-aware construction helmet – to win the 2024 James Dyson Award (Hong Kong Champion).

Selected Publications

PhD, MSc, Chinese University of Hong Kong; BEng, Fudan University.

• MoRA: Mobility as the backbone for geospatial representation learning at scale
  Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026)
• Demo2Vec: Learning Region Embedding with Demographic Information
  ACM SIGSPATIAL GeoAI 2024

• Wildfire containment using multi-drone systems: A predict-then-optimize approach IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2026)
• Vector-based Pedestrian Navigation in Cities
  Nature Computational Science

• Cost-effective Sensor Placement Optimization for Large-scale Urban Sewage Surveillance
  Sustainable Cities and Society

• Climate-Conscious Urban Growth Planning Mitigates Urban Warming: Shenzhen as a Case Study
  Environmental Science & Technology