CV

Contact Information

Name Zhou Ziheng
Professional Title PhD Candidate
Email josephziheng [at] ucla [dot] edu

Experience

  • 2016 - 2021

    Los Angeles
    Shanghai

    Co-Founder & Head of Eye Department
    VoxelCloud 体素科技
    Co-founded AI medical imaging company (LA + Shanghai). Raised ~$100M from Sequoia China, Tencent, and other leading investors (Angel → Series B). Cross-functional oversight in a 100-person org. Board member; participated in fundraising, GTM expansion, and product roadmap decisions.
    • Directly led Eye Department (5–7 direct reports, product + AI)
    • Scaled Diabetic Retinopathy screening product to 300+ hospitals and 120k+ screening sessions
    • Built clinical data acquisition & labeling engine to 2M+ records via partnerships with EyePACS, PUMCH, Zhongshan Eye Center, and other top hospitals
    • Led model and pipeline R&D (team of 3–5, collaborations with UCLA & ASU) to reach regulatory-grade accuracy
    • Designed clinical trial protocol and drove regulatory submission to CFDA approval; won First Place in Med-AI Challenge at World AI Conference Shanghai 2018
  • 2025 - 2026

    Los Angeles

    Founder
    Manifield
    Founded an AI startup building a proactive, self-evolving, local-first agentic workspace with generative UI for knowledge workers (AI-native OS).
    • Assembled a team of five from University of Cambridge, Tsinghua University, UCLA and BIGAI Institute
    • Built working prototype (downloadable github repo) and secured a term sheet of ¥10M (RMB) at ¥100M valuation
    • Paused to redeploy after competitive-landscape analysis forecast
  • 2015 - 2015

    Los Angeles

    Co-founder
    Sistina
    Co-founded an AI-assisted photo curation and social platform. Built a working prototype; project ended due to inconclusive user testing results and disagreements over future direction.
  • 2014 - 2014

    Los Angeles

    Co-founder
    SingleFile
    Co-founded a startup attempting to solve the ticket-queuing problem by balancing financial and time investment. A student summer project; the team disbanded after the summer ended.

Education

  • 2021 - 2026

    Los Angeles, CA

    Ph.D.
    University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
    Computer Science
    • Advisors: Demetri Terzopoulos (Distinguished Prof.), Song-Chun Zhu (Director of BIGAI), Yingnian Wu
    • Committee: Judea Pearl (Turing Award), Kaiwei Chang
  • 2012 - 2017

    Los Angeles, CA

    B.S.
    University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
    Computer Science
    • Minors in Philosophy & Cognitive Science

Skills

AI & CS: Python, PyTorch, LLM Training (RL/SFT, Diffusion, PEFT/LoRA), Distributed Training, Agent Systems (Multi-Agent, Agentic Workflow), Dataset, Benchmark & Evaluation, Multi-modal (Vision-Language)
Product & Leadership: AI roadmap & execution; 0→1→scale delivery; cross-functional leadership; hiring & bar-raising; PRDs/specs; metrics/OKRs; GTM alignment

Academic Professional Service

Reviewer: ICLR 2025, 2026; NeurIPS 2023, 2024, 2025; ICML 2025, 2026; ACL 2025; COLM 2025, 2026
Invited Talks: 14th National Analytical Philosophy Conference of China; 2nd Workshop on Philosophy and AI (Peking University); Foundational Meta-cognition Problem Workshop (Henan University)