PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Jun Zhao

Also known as 赵军

Jun Zhao is a professor at the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences whose group works on natural language processing, large language models and knowledge engineering. After a PhD at Tsinghua University in 1998 and a postdoctoral stay at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, he joined the institute in 2002. With Kang Liu and other coauthors, he wrote a COLING 2014 best paper on relation classification with convolutional networks and the 2015 AAAI paper on recurrent convolutional networks for text classification. His projects on text knowledge acquisition and knowledge graphs won the 2018 Qian Weichang award and the 2019 Beijing Science and Technology Progress Award, and he received the Best Poster Award at ISWC in 2023. He is a full professor and doctoral supervisor at the institute and teaches Knowledge Engineering at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Badges

Timeline

  1. 1998–2002

    Joining the Institute of Automation

    He earns a PhD at Tsinghua University in 1998 and works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology until 2002. In 2002, he joins the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

  2. 2014

    Best paper at COLING 2014

    In 2014, he coauthors "Relation Classification via Convolutional Deep Neural Network" with Daojian Zeng, Kang Liu, Siwei Lai and Guangyou Zhou for COLING 2014 in Dublin. The conference gives the paper one of its two best paper awards, sponsored by IBM Watson.

  3. 2015

    Neural networks for text and relations

    In 2015, he coauthors "Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks for Text Classification" at AAAI with Siwei Lai, Liheng Xu and Kang Liu, a model that classifies text without human-designed features. He also coauthors "Event Extraction via Dynamic Multi-Pooling Convolutional Neural Networks" at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Beijing and "Distant Supervision for Relation Extraction via Piecewise Convolutional Neural Networks" at EMNLP in Lisbon.

  4. 2018–2019

    Qian Weichang and Beijing prizes

    A platform for large-scale open-domain text knowledge acquisition that he leads wins first prize of the Qian Weichang Chinese information processing science and technology award of the Chinese Information Processing Society of China in 2018. In 2019, a project he leads on open-domain textual knowledge acquisition and knowledge graph construction wins first prize of the Beijing Science and Technology Progress Award.

  5. 2020–2021

    Teaching knowledge engineering

    As a professor at the School of Artificial Intelligence of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, he teaches the Knowledge Engineering course, which is named an Outstanding Graduate Course in 2021. In 2020, he receives the Zhuli Yuehua Outstanding Teacher Award of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

  6. 2023

    Best poster at ISWC 2023

    He receives the Best Poster Award at the 22nd International Semantic Web Conference in 2023.

  7. 2025–2026

    RAG-RewardBench and ACL papers

    In 2025, he coauthors RAG-RewardBench with Zhuoran Jin, Kang Liu and others, a benchmark that evaluates 45 reward models for retrieval-augmented generation and appears in Findings of ACL 2025. Ten papers from his group are accepted at ACL 2025 and 17 at ACL 2026.

  8. As of October 2026

    Professor at the Institute of Automation

    He is a full professor and doctoral supervisor at the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a professor at the School of Artificial Intelligence of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research covers natural language processing, large language models and knowledge engineering. His more than 100 papers have drawn over 28,000 citations on Google Scholar.

Career

  1. Since 2020University of Chinese Academy of SciencesProfessor
  2. Since 2002Chinese Academy of SciencesFull Professor
  3. 1998–2002Hong Kong University of Science and TechnologyPostdoctoral Researcher

Education

  1. 1998Tsinghua UniversityPhD

From the biography.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Jun Zhao. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. Universities keep AI researchers for a median of 6 years, compared with 2 years at frontier labsIncludes Chinese Academy of Sciences. Across 15,811 dated work stays (6,529 people), median role tenure runs from 6 years at universities to 2 years at frontier labs. We compare all five organization types, starting decades from the 1970s to the 2020s, and the organizations that keep people longest.
  3. People shaping AI work at a median of 3 organizations over a career: 3 for university starters and institute and lab starters, versus 2 for company startersIncludes Chinese Academy of Sciences. Across 6,853 people shaping AI with a dated work role, we estimate a median of 3 parent organizations over a career (mean 3.6), comparing role groups, starting sectors and starting decades from the 1950s to 2020–2026.
  4. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Chinese Academy of Sciences. 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.

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 Jun Zhao yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Jun Zhao zhaojun-nlpr.github.io. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. 赵军----中国科学院自动化研究所 ia.cas.cn. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. Relation Classification via Convolutional Deep Neural Network - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. 2015Q3 Reports: COLING 2014 - Admin Wiki aclweb.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks for Text Classification | Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence ojs.aaai.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. Event Extraction via Dynamic Multi-Pooling Convolutional Neural Networks - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  7. Distant Supervision for Relation Extraction via Piecewise Convolutional Neural Networks - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  8. RAG-RewardBench: Benchmarking Reward Models in Retrieval Augmented Generation for Preference Alignment - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 22 October 2026.