Biography

Junqiao (John) Zhao is a tenured Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science and Technology at Tongji University. His research focuses on spatial and embodied intelligence, particularly persistent spatial memory, spatial understanding and localization, reinforcement learning, and safe decision-making for long-horizon tasks in embodied agents and autonomous systems.

He received his Ph.D. from the State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing (LIESMARS) at Wuhan University. During his doctoral studies, he was a visiting researcher at Leibniz University Hannover and the Technical University of Munich. He later conducted postdoctoral research at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

At Tongji, he is a member of the embodied intelligence research team led by Academician Changjun Jiang, where Prof. Guang Chen leads the embodied intelligence research direction. He also leads the Tongji Intelligence, Embodiment and Vision Lab (TIEV). The lab works on autonomous platforms, multi-sensor perception and localization, agent memory architectures, and learning-based decision-making. Its open-source autonomous driving platforms, TIEV and TIEV Plus, supported Tongji's autonomous driving research and system-level testing from 2015 to 2021. The platforms placed seventh in the 2018 China Intelligent Vehicle Future Challenge and second in the autonomous driving simulation competition at WAIC 2022.

Contact

• Office: Room 232, Telecom Building, Tongji University, 4800 Cao'an Highway, Jiading District, Shanghai, China
• Email: zhaojunqiao(AT)tongji.edu.cn