Zhao Cao

PROFESSOR

Zhao Cao is a Professor at the Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China (RUC). He received his Bachelor's degree (2004) and Ph.D. degree (2010) from Beijing Institute of Technology. He joined RUC in May 2025. Previously, he served as Director of Huawei's Poisson Lab, Chief Architect of EI (Enterprise Intelligence) Service & Product Department at Huawei Cloud (leading architecture design for large models, big data, and Ascend Cloud technologies), Chair of Huawei’s Search Technology Working Group, and Chair of Huawei’s Blockchain Technology Working Group. He lead the team and developed Huawei's search engine kernel and blockchain kernel from scratch, playing a pivotal role in core products and services of Huawei. His research focuses on agents, large models, information retrieval, and distributed systems. He has published over 30 papers and filed 20+ patents in related fields. The book 《Blockchain Technology and Applications》, which he lead the writing, is ranked among the top 1% of most-cited publications. He serves as Standing Committee Member of the Information Retrieval Technical Committee of the Chinese Information Processing Society of China (CIPS), Member of the Language Generation & Large Model Technical Committee (CIPS), and Committee Member of the Blockchain Technical Committee and Database Technical Committee under the China Computer Federation (CCF).

EDUCATION

2008–2010: Visiting Ph.D. Student, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

2004–2010: Ph.D in School of Computer Science, Beijing Institute of Technology

2000–2004: B.Eng. in Computer Science, School of Information Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology

WORK EXPERIENCE

2025–Present: Professor, Renmin University of China

2017–2025: Director of Poisson Lab, Huawei; Chief Architect and Leader of Architecture & Design Department, Huawei Cloud EI Services and Products

2015–2017: Associate Researcher, School of Computer Science, Beijing Institute of Technology

2010–2015: Senior Researcher, IBM China Research Lab / HP Labs China

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Large Models: Agents, information retrieval, vertical large models

Distributed Systems: AI infrastructure, Data4AI, AI4Data, blockchain

Current focus: Agent Memory Research — developing autonomous agents with human-level cognitive depth. Aims to construct evolving "Digital Life Graphs" for self-adaptive agents in universal scenarios and enable personalized digital twins (passing individualized Turing tests).

PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS/STAFFS

Curious, self-motivated, and capable of independent problem-solving.

Hands-on experience in programming/system development.

Training philosophy: Vision-driven, problem-oriented R&D; developing technologies deployable at scale within 3–8 years.

TEACHING

Intelligent Computing Systems (Undergraduate, starting 2026)

AI & Python Programming (Undergraduate, starting 2026)

RESEARCH PROJECTS

10+ R&D projects on large models, information retrieval, and blockchain at Huawei (2017–2025)

Sub-project Lead for National Key R&D Program "Multilingual Knowledge Representation and Fusion for Big Data" (2017)

PUBLICATIONS

Full list: https://dblp.org/pid/69/8078.htm

SERVICES

Conference Co-Chair: CCIR 2025, EVIA 2025

Program Committee Member: ACL (2024–2025), MultiMedia (2021), VLDB (2016, 2017, 2022–2025), ICDE (2025)

Committee Roles: Standing Committee Member of CIPS Information Retrieval TC, Member of CIPS Language Generation & Large Model TC, Member of CCF Blockchain TC and Database TC

Technical Committee Member, MIIT Key Laboratory of Blockchain & Data Security

CONTACT

Email：caozhao@ruc.edu.cn

Website：