Rate My Professor Zhe Hou

Dr. Zhe Hou is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Information and Communication Technology at Griffith University, advancing to this position in 2023 after serving as Lecturer from 2019 to 2022. He leads the Neural-Symbolic Reasoning group and is recognized as a researcher in logic, automated reasoning, and artificial intelligence. Hou obtained his PhD in Computer Science from the Australian National University in 2015, focusing on automated reasoning for program verification, earning runner-up in the John Makepeace Bennett Award for the best Australian PhD thesis. He also holds a Master of Computing from the Australian National University (2011) and a Bachelor of Software Engineering from Xidian University (2010). Prior to his faculty role, Hou was a Research Fellow at Griffith University's Institute for Integrated and Intelligent Systems from 2017 to 2019, working on a Defence-funded project for trustworthy autonomous systems. He previously held postdoctoral and research assistant positions at Nanyang Technological University from 2015 to 2017, specializing in formal verification of information flow security in full-stack systems.

Hou's research interests encompass automated reasoning techniques such as separation logic, theorem proving, and model checking; machine learning and large language models including explainable AI and neural-symbolic reasoning; formal methods covering program verification, weak memory models, and information-flow security; autonomous systems with planning, goal reasoning, federated reinforcement learning, and multi-agent collaboration; blockchain interoperability, cross-chain protocols, and security; sports analytics for strategy and video analysis; and quantum computing for program verification and algorithms. He authored the textbook Fundamentals of Logic and Computation: With Practical Automated Reasoning and Verification (Springer, 2021). Key publications include "Generically Automating Separation Logic by Functors" (2025), "A Parallel and Distributed Quantum SAT Solver Based on Entanglement" (2024), and "Multi-agent reinforcement curriculum learning for real unmanned ground vehicles" (2026), which achieved a 99.67% success rate in AI robot firefighting trials as project Lead Chief Investigator. Hou has received the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at FSE 2025, ICFEM Organisation Leadership Award (2024), ICECCS and PDCAT Organiser Leadership Awards (2019), ICFEM Chair Leadership Award (2018), Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (2022), and Australian Computer Society membership (2023). He serves as Chief Investigator on ARC-funded projects, including AI-powered collaborative firefighting robots.