Professor Zhou moved to The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in January 2021.

Professor Zhou received his BSc and MSc degrees in Computer Science from Nanjing University in 1984 and 1987 respectively, and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Queensland in 1994. From 1994 to 1999, he worked as a Senior Research Scientist in CSIRO, leading its Spatial Information Systems group. He joined UQ in 1999 as a Senior Lecturer and became a Professor of Computer Science in 2004. From 2006 to 2020, he was Head of UQ Data and Knowledge Engineering (DKE) research group and Data Science discipline. Under his leadership, DKE becomes one of a few top computer science research groups in Australia that has received 5 out of 5 Excellence in Research for Australian (ERA) ranking for three consecutive rounds since 2012.