Assistant Professor Mike Shou Named 2026 Asian Young Scientist Fellow
Assistant Professor Mike Shou has been named a 2026 Asian Young Scientist Fellow, one of 12 early-career researchers selected this year and one of four in the Mathematics and Computer Science category.
Asst Prof Shou holds a joint appointment at NUS Computing’s Department of Computer Science and NUS College of Design and Engineering’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The Fellowship recognises his work in multimodal video intelligence and will support his research on video AI systems that can act, whether that means operating a computer on someone’s behalf or guiding a robot in a hospital or a laboratory.
The Asian Young Scientist Fellowship supports researchers within 10 years of their doctorate with US$100,000 in unrestricted funding over two years.
Show Lab
He joined NUS in 2021 as a Presidential Young Professor, the same year he was awarded an NRF Fellowship, after working as a research scientist at Facebook AI. Since then his group has widened its scope considerably. Show Lab has built models that learn from first-person video, the view a pair of smart glasses or a home robot would have. It has released some of the earliest open video diffusion models. Its more recent work fuses understanding and generation into single models, and treats video as something an AI can act on rather than only describe.
The Fellowship proposal takes that last strand forward. Asst Prof Shou’s plan centres on Video-Language-Action agents and video world models.
“I’m very honoured to be named an AYS Fellow, which is truly a recognition of our research on video AI, the efforts of my students and collaborators, and the strong support from NUS. With this fellowship, I look forward to advancing our research on Video-Language-Action agents and Video World Models – shifting video AI from passive observer into active agent, such as digital agent for computer use and robotic agent for healthcare and scientific discovery,” Asst Prof Shou said.
In 2025 Asst Prof Shou received the inaugural Provost’s Innovation Chair Professor Award and the Innovation Venture Creation Award for the translational potential of his video AI work. He is the second NUS Computing faculty member to receive the Fellowship, after Associate Professor Reza Shokri in the inaugural 2023 cohort. The 2026 Fellows will present their work at the AYSF Annual Conference in Hong Kong in November.
