PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Alex Chichung Kot

Also known as Alex Kot, Alex C. Kot, 葛治中

Alex Chichung Kot is an electrical engineer whose research runs from signal processing and image forensics to deep-learning work on action recognition and domain generalization. He joined Nanyang Technological University in 1991, headed its Division of Information Engineering for eight years, and received the Best Teacher of the Year award in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering in 1996. Kot was General Co-Chair of IEEE ICIP 2004 and served as Vice President-Finance of the IEEE Signal Processing Society for 2013–2015. By 2017 he directed the Rapid-Rich Object Search (ROSE) Lab at NTU, which he founded, and he coauthored work on skeleton-based action recognition in 2017, domain generalization in 2018 and the NTU RGB+D 120 benchmark in 2019. Since September 2025, he is Distinguished Professor and Chief Scientist at Shenzhen MSU-BIT University, and he is an Emeritus Professor at NTU, an IEEE Life Fellow and a Fellow of the Academy of Engineering Singapore.

Now at
Shenzhen MSU-BIT University
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Timeline

  1. 1991

    Joining Nanyang Technological University

    He joins Nanyang Technological University in Singapore in 1991. He heads the Division of Information Engineering for eight years, and his publications cover signal processing for communication, biometrics, image forensics and information security.

  2. 1996

    Best teacher award at NTU

    He is named Best Teacher of the Year in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at NTU in 1996.

  3. 2004–2006

    ICIP co-chair and CASS lecturer

    He serves as General Co-Chair of the 2004 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP). In 2005 and 2006, he is an IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Distinguished Lecturer.

  4. 2013–2015

    Vice President-Finance at IEEE SPS

    He serves a 2013–2015 term as Vice President-Finance of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, succeeding Min Wu of the University of Maryland. He is a Society Distinguished Lecturer in 2014 and 2015, and in 2015 he gives lectures in Croatia, Utah and Oregon titled "Image Forensics: is a photo worth a thousand words?".

  5. 2017

    Directing the ROSE Lab

    In 2017, he directs the Rapid-Rich Object Search (ROSE) Lab at NTU, which he founded and which has 12 faculty, 26 research staff and 48 PhD students. Its work covers visual object search, deep learning and visual analytics, and multimedia forensics, and since 2012 it has secured 24 industry partners, including Tencent and NVIDIA.

  6. 2017–2018

    Action recognition and domain generalization

    In 2017, he coauthors a spatio-temporal LSTM network with trust gates for skeleton-based action recognition with Jun Liu, Amir Shahroudy, Dong Xu and Gang Wang, tested on seven benchmark datasets. In 2018, he coauthors a CVPR paper on domain generalization with adversarial autoencoders with Haoliang Li, Sinno Jialin Pan and Shiqi Wang.

  7. 2019

    The NTU RGB+D 120 benchmark

    In 2019, he coauthors NTU RGB+D 120 with Jun Liu, Amir Shahroudy, Mauricio Perez, Gang Wang and Ling-Yu Duan. The dataset holds more than 114 thousand video samples from 106 subjects across 120 action classes and appears in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

  8. September 2025

    Chief Scientist at Shenzhen MSU-BIT

    In September 2025, Shenzhen MSU-BIT University appoints him Distinguished Professor and Chief Scientist as a full-time faculty member. His earlier NTU posts include Associate Dean of the College of Engineering and Director of the NTU-PKU Joint Research Institute. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Engineering Singapore, an IEEE Life Fellow and an Emeritus Professor at NTU's School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.

Career

  1. Since 2025Shenzhen MSU-BIT UniversityDistinguished Professor and Chief Scientist
  2. From 1991Nanyang Technological UniversityHead, Founder

From the biography.

  1. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Nanyang Technological University. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  2. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Nanyang Technological University. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  3. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Nanyang Technological University. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.
  4. 5 of the 25 people with the most-cited recent papers also lead on career citationsIncludes Nanyang Technological University. We compare citations to 2023–2025 papers with career citations and h-index, after correcting reviewed publication-date errors: who leads, when they started and where they work.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. Alex KOT | China-Singapore International Joint Research Institute csijri.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. 葛治中-深圳北理莫斯科大学 smbu.edu.cn. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. New Society Officers for 2013 | IEEE Signal Processing Society signalprocessingsociety.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. SPS Distinguished Lectures | IEEE Signal Processing Society signalprocessingsociety.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Talk: Alex Kot from NTU, Singapore | RECOD — Reasoning for Complex Data recodbr.wordpress.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. [1706.08276] Skeleton-Based Action Recognition Using Spatio-Temporal LSTM Network with Trust Gates arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. CVPR 2018 Open Access Repository: Domain Generalization With Adversarial Feature Learning openaccess.thecvf.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. [1905.04757] NTU RGB+D 120: A Large-Scale Benchmark for 3D Human Activity Understanding arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. Academician Alex Kot Joins Shenzhen MSU-BIT University as Full-Time Faculty Member en.smbu.edu.cn. Checked 21 October 2026.