Yutong Zhou is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF), Germany. She received her Ph.D. in Information Science and Engineering from Ritsumeikan University, Japan.

Her research focuses on the intersection of Scientific AI, Multimodal Intelligence, and Human-AI Collaboration. She is particularly interested in developing AI systems under heterogeneous, incomplete, and uncertain data conditions while remaining transparent, interpretable, and useful to domain experts.

Through interdisciplinary collaborations across biodiversity, environmental science, agriculture, healthcare, and knowledge systems, she explores how AI can support scientific discovery, preserve and transfer expertise, and enable responsible real-world deployment. Her long-term vision is to establish the data, evaluation, and methodological foundations for next-generation AI ecosystems and scientific communities.

📖 Education

• Sep. 2020 ~ Sep. 2023 Ph.D. Information Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University, Japan (GPA: 5.0/5.0)
• Sep. 2018 ~ Sep. 2020 M.E. Information Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University, Japan (GPA: 4.76/5.0)
• Sep. 2016 ~ Sep. 2018 B.E. Information Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University, Japan
• Sep. 2014 ~ Sep. 2018 B.E. Software Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, China

📝 Publications

🌾Agriculture and Biodiversity

• [ECAI 2025-AISE] From Images to Insights: Explainable Biodiversity Monitoring with Plain Language Habitat Explanations [Code]
  • Yutong Zhou and Masahiro Ryo
• [ECCV 2024-CVPPA] AgriBench: A Hierarchical Agriculture Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models [Dataset]
  • Yutong Zhou and Masahiro Ryo

📚 Survey

• [CVPR 2023-GCV] Vision + Language Applications: A Survey [Poster] [Project]
  • Yutong Zhou and Nobutaka Shimada

🍽 Aesthetic Box Lunch Presentation Design

• [CVPR 2023-WiCV] Design a Delicious Lunchbox in Style [Poster]
  • Yutong Zhou
• [ACMMM 2022-CEA++] ABLE: Aesthetic Box Lunch Editing [Dataset]
  • Yutong Zhou and Nobutaka Shimada

🙋🏻‍♀️ Text-to-Face Generation

• [FG 2021] (Best Poster Award) Generative Adversarial Network for Text-to-Face Synthesis and Manipulation with Pretrained BERT Model [Dataset]
  • Yutong Zhou and Nobutaka Shimada
• [ACMMM 2021-Doctoral Symposium] Generative Adversarial Network for Text-to-Face Synthesis and Manipulation [Video]
  • Yutong Zhou

🌧 Video Deraining and Desnowing

• [SN Computer Science] Rain Streaks and Snowflakes Removal for Video Sequences via Motion Compensation and Matrix Completion [Video]
  • Yutong Zhou and Nobutaka Shimada
• [ACPR 2019] Using Motion Compensation and Matrix Completion Algorithm to Remove Rain Streaks and Snow for Video Sequences
  • Yutong Zhou and Nobutaka Shimada

🏆 Honors

Award

• 2024  Travel Award  WiML Workshop at NeurIPS2024 ($1,685)
• 2023  Travel Award  WiCV Workshop at CVPR2023 ($1,200)
• 2022  Excellent Paper Award  Association of Chinese Alumni (10 winners in Japan)
• 2022  Research Paper Award  Ritsumeikan University (11 winners)
• 2021  Best Poster Award  IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition 2021 (Top 5%)
• 2020  Research Paper Award  Ritsumeikan University (10 winners)

Scholarship

• 2021~2023  NEXT Fellowship of MEXT  Graduate School at Ritsumeikan University (15 winners)
• 2020~2023  Fully Funded Scholarship  Graduate School at Ritsumeikan University (Top 5%)
• 2019~2020  Asahi Glass Foundation  For International Students (6 winners in Japan)
• 2018~2020  Fully Funded Scholarship  Graduate School at Ritsumeikan University (Top 5%)
• 2017~2018  Fully Funded Scholarship  International undergraduate students at Ritsumeikan University (Top 5%)

🌱 Research Experience

Postdoc Researcher

[Dec. 2023 ~ Present]

• BiodivKI Project - KICS-Zert: AI and citizen science-supported monitoring of certified biodiversity.

NEXT Research Fellow

[Apr. 2021 ~ Sep. 2023]

• Supported by JST, the establishment of university fellowships towards the creation of science and technology innovation, Grant Number JPMJFS2146.

Assistant Academic Advisor

[Apr. 2020 ~ Sep. 2023]

• Assist undergraduate students and master students in accomplishing their academic goals.
  • Apr.2020–Apr.2021 Face-glasses Pair Composition
  • Apr.2020–Apr.2022 Neural Sign Language Translation
  • Sep.2022–Sep.2023 Controllable Text-to-Image Generation and Manipulation

Research Coach

[Jul. 2022 ~ Feb. 2023]

• Advising senior high school researchers from the standpoint of a young researcher.
• Supported by the consortium to discover and nurture Shiga-growing industries.

Research Assistant

[Sep. 2020 ~ Jul. 2021]

• Worked on ingredients placement order & location prediction for industrial automatic robotics.

Teaching Assistant

[Sep. 2018 ~ Aug. 2020]

🍬 Academic Services

Invited Talk

• Sino-German Frontiers of Science and Technology Symposium, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation [Website]
  • AI That Doesn’t Break: Resilient Multimodal Intelligence for Science and Society (April,2026)
• Brazilian-German Frontiers of Science and Technology Symposium, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation [Website]
  • Beyond generation: Robust AI for industry, labour, and agriculture (November,2025)
• Science For All: Diverse Voices on The Box @ Berlin Science Week [Website]
  • Soapbox Science Berlin, LGBTQ+ STEM Berlin (2 November,2024)

Organizer

• Accessible Aging AI: Building an Affinity Community for Diverse Human Abilities in AI, IJCAI-ECAI 2026 Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) Activities
• AI Modeling for Disappearing Knowledge (AIM4DK), IJCAI-ECAI 2026 Workshop
• Empathic AI: Face, Gesture, and Accessibility Technologies, FG 2026 Workshop
• Women in Machine Learning (WiML) Social, ICLR 2024 Social Activities

Programme Committee

• European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI)

Journal Reviewer

• Computers and Electronics in Agriculture
• Signal, Image and Video Processing
• Fractal and Fractional

Conference Reviewer

• European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)
• Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
• The International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)
• ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM)
• Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
• IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face & Gesture Recognition (FG)

Director for General Academic Exchange Committee

• Association of Chinese Alumni in Japan 2022~2023

☃️ Useful Resources

🤹🏻‍♀️ Better Life

• HowToLiveLonger: A programmer’s guide to live longer.

👩🏻‍💻 Better Academic

• AI Conference Deadlines: Countdowns to top CV/NLP/ML/Robotics/AI conference deadlines.
• awesome-chatgpt-prompts: A collection of prompt examples to be used with the ChatGPT model.
• ChatPaper: Use ChatGPT to summarize papers.
• nlp-phd-global-equality: Resources to Help Global Equality for PhDs in NLP / AI.