Zhou Bowen, an authoritative scientist in the artificial intelligence sector, joined e-commerce firm JD as vice president of JD Group.

In his new role, Zhou will be responsible for businesses related to JD's AI research and platform unit. Zhou will directly report to JD Group's chairman and chief executive officer Liu Qiangdong.

JD's AI research and platform unit will focus on AI algorithm innovation and expanding AI for retail infrastructures.

Before joining JD, Zhou worked at IBM's New York headquarters as head of AI Foundations of IBM Research. As chief scientist of IBM Watson, Zhou was in charge of IBM Worldwide's strategy and implementation of basic research of artificial intelligence and deep learning. Under his leadership, Zhou's team participated in the algorithm development, engineering and commercial realization, and application of Watson's artificial intelligence platform.

In the professional area, Zhou published over one hundred papers on world-class journals and at top academic conferences. Their contents cover artificial intelligence, deep learning, natural semantic understanding, machine translation, and speech recognition.