Shaofeng Zou

Shaofeng Zou is joining the Sun Devil community as an associate professor in the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. He comes to ASU after serving as an assistant professor at the University of Buffalo.

“I believe that ASU will be the perfect place for me to move forward in my academic career and start an exciting journey with brilliant colleagues and students,” Zou says. “ASU has a strong program in AI, machine learning, signal processing and information theory, which provides a wealth of exciting collaboration opportunities.”

Zou is eager to design new algorithms and investigate fundamental theoretical understandings of modern machine learning and reinforcement learning problems. He aspires to lead courses that will equip students for a future career in the rising field of AI and prepare them for challenges in probability, optimization and programming.

He says students taking his courses should be prepared for challenges ranging from basic engineering math like linear algebra, probability, and optimization to programming algorithms using tools like Python and MatLab. 

Zou arrives at ASU with a wealth of accomplishments and an impressive track record of success so far in his career. He won a Distinguished Paper Award from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a 2024 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program Award for developing robust reinforcement learning under model uncertainty, and the 2020 National Science Foundation Computer and Information Science and Engineering Research (CRII) Initiation Initiative Award for his work in dynamic network event detection with time-series data.

“Solving hard problems elegantly and efficiently makes me feel happy,” he says.

Zou can be found gardening when he isn’t advancing AI modeling, accepting research awards or teaching.

Meet the newest faculty members of the Fulton Schools of Engineering here.

Written by Hannah Weisman