PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Bolei Zhou

Bolei Zhou is a computer vision researcher whose work links scene understanding and interpretable AI. He co-developed datasets and methods that help visual AI systems identify images and locate class-specific evidence. After an assistant professorship at CUHK, he joined UCLA, where he is an associate professor and directs the Vision and Autonomy Intelligence Lab. Since October 2025, he is also chief AI scientist at Coco Robotics and leads its Physical AI Lab.

Works
241
Citations
45,645
h-index
64
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 19 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. By 2021

    Places and ADE20K

    By 2021, he helps develop Places and ADE20K, computer-vision benchmarks that aid AI systems in identifying images.

  2. 2016

    Class Activation Mapping

    At CVPR 2016, he and four coauthors publish Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization. Its Class Activation Mapping method lets an image classifier trained on image-level labels localize discriminative image regions.

  3. 2017

    Network Dissection

    In 2017, he coauthors Network Dissection with David Bau; the paper quantifies the interpretability of deep visual representations.

  4. 2018

    A doctorate in visual intelligence

    In 2018, he completes a computer science PhD at MIT with a thesis on interpretable representation learning for visual intelligence; his thesis committee includes Antonio Torralba, Aude Oliva, and Bill Freeman.

  5. 2021–2022

    From CUHK to UCLA

    In October 2021, UCLA announces he will join its Computer Science Department in early 2022. At the time, he is an assistant professor in CUHK's Information Engineering Department.

  6. 2024–2025

    NSF and ONR awards

    He receives an NSF CAREER Award in 2024 for embodied AI research. In 2025, the Office of Naval Research gives him a Young Investigator Program award for work on data-driven simulation and vision-language models.

  7. Since October 2025

    Leading Coco's Physical AI Lab

    In October 2025, he joins Coco Robotics as chief AI scientist and leads its new Physical AI Lab. As of October 2026, he is an associate professor in UCLA's Computer Science Department and directs the Vision and Autonomy Intelligence Lab.

Career

  1. Since 2025Coco RoboticsChief AI Scientist
  2. Since 2021University of California, Los AngelesAssociate Professor
  3. 2014–2021MIT CSAIL
  4. 2011–2022Chinese University of Hong KongAssistant Professor

Education

  1. 2018Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyPhD

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Most-cited works

  1. Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization2016 · IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 11,303 citationsWith Aditya Khosla, Antonio Torralba and Aude Oliva
  2. Places: A 10 Million Image Database for Scene Recognition2017 · IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence · 3,973 citationsWith Aditya Khosla, Antonio Torralba and Aude Oliva
  3. Scene Parsing through ADE20K Dataset2017 · IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 3,292 citationsWith Antonio Torralba and Sanja Fidler
  4. Learning Deep Features for Scene Recognition using Places Database2014 · 2,533 citationsWith Antonio Torralba and Aude Oliva
  5. Unified Perceptual Parsing for Scene Understanding2018 · Lecture notes in computer science · 2,188 citations

From OpenAlex, as of 19 October 2026.

  1. Stanford University trained or employed 26 of the 108 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes University of California, Los Angeles. Stanford University trained or employed 26 of the 108 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and employment links for major-prize and best-paper winners.
  2. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Our estimates of where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led, from education records in cited biographies.
  3. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers rose from 2% to 32%Includes University of California, Los Angeles. We estimate where leading AI researchers worked when their most-cited papers appeared. The company share rose from 2% in 1975–1979 to 32% in 2020–2024.
  4. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes University of California, Los Angeles. Our estimates of combined and median h-index at AI organizations, using current affiliations and OpenAlex records.

Colleagues

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

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Bolei Zhou yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Bolei Zhou people.csail.mit.edu. Checked 18 October 2026.
  2. UCLA Samueli Welcomes Bolei Zhou as Assistant Professor of Computer Science samueli.ucla.edu. Checked 18 October 2026.
  3. Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization arxiv.org. Checked 18 October 2026.
  4. Computer science professor receives NSF award for AI that interacts with real world newsroom.ucla.edu. Checked 18 October 2026.
  5. Professor Bolei Zhou Receives Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research cs.ucla.edu. Checked 18 October 2026.
  6. Bolei Zhou | UCLA Samueli School Of Engineering samueli.ucla.edu. Checked 18 October 2026.
  7. Bolei Zhou boleizhou.github.io. Checked 18 October 2026.
  8. Autonomy at Coco cocodelivery.com. Checked 18 October 2026.
  9. Renowned AI Researcher Bolei Zhou Joins Coco Robotics to Lead the World's Largest Autonomous Delivery Fleet prnewswire.com. Checked 18 October 2026.