# Rong Zhou

> AI | Big Data | ML on GPU/TPU | Graph Analytics | Planning & Scheduling

Location: Palo Alto, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/rongzhou

AI and Big Data expert with 18+ years of experience, 100+ publications, and 50+ issued US patents. Led teams in industry (Google) and research (PARC). Veteran of performance & power optimization for GPU/TPU/DSP-based ML and Graph Analytics on ARM/x86 processors. Systems builder with a track record of shipping products, including Pixel phones. Editorial board member of Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR).

## Work Experience
### Staff Software Engineer @ Zoox
Jan 2023 – Present
ML Platform

### Engineering Manager, Platform Software Performance & Power, Google Silicon @ Google
Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 | Mountain View
• Performance & power optimization for TensorFlow models on Google Tensor chips
• ML Apps: Realtime Camera, Post Shot, and Speech use cases on Pixel phones
• Deep Learning: CNNs (MobileNet, Inception, ResNet) and RNNs (LSTMs) with quantization
• Integration of continuous regression testing with Google Silicon Device Cloud
• Automatic performance & power regression detection and culprit finding infrastructure

### Staff Software Engineer, ML & Image Applications, Google Silicon @ Google
Jan 2017 – Jan 2021 | Mountain View
• ML Apps: FaceAuth, OCR, Speech Recognition, and Top Shot
• Fixed-point Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) written in C++ (Halide) on Pixel Visual Core for Pixel 2
• HDR+ burst photography for low-light imaging accelerated on Pixel Visual Core for Pixel 3
• Face single-shot detection performance & power optimization on Edge TPU for Pixel 4

### Founder Manager of High-Performance Analytics, Senior Researcher, Interactions & Analytics Lab @ Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
Jan 2012 – Jan 2017 | Palo Alto, California
• High-performance graph analytics engine for Big Data and recommender systems
• GPU-based ML (e.g., k-means, PageRank) and matrix ops (GEMM, GEMV) with "smart" CUDA kernels
• IoT-optimized graph algorithms > 1,000x more efficient than GraphLab and GraphX in perf / watt
• Large-scale PageRank on hyperlink graph with 128 billion edges < 26 seconds per iteration
• Freebase knowledge graph with 1 billion facts and 106 million entities compressed by 7.5x
• Worldwide GeoIP lookup < 16ns and realtime GeoNames search with 7.2M GPS locations from YAGO

### Research Scientist, Embedded Reasoning Area, Intelligent Systems Lab @ Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
Jan 2005 – Jan 2011 | Palo Alto, California
• Online planning & scheduling of reconfigurable printers led to world's fastest duplex cut-sheet printer
• Parallel and external-memory graph search for domain-independent planning and model checking
• Model-based control and planner-assisted active diagnosis
• Anytime heuristic search for combinatorial optimization and sequence alignment


## Education
### PhD in Artificial Intelligence
Mississippi State University

### Master’s Degree in Robotics
Tongji University

### Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering
Xi'an Jiaotong University


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/rong-zhou-ai

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Source: https://flows.cv/rongzhou
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/rongzhou/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-12