Tianming Liu

Biography

Tianming Liu is a Distinguished Research Professor and UGA Athletic Association Professor in the University of Georgia School of Computing and Department of Linguistics. He is an American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) Fellow and a Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention Society (MICCAI) Fellow. He has been a full professor at UGA since 2015 and was named a Distinguished Research Professor in 2017.

He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in automation from Northwestern Polytechnical University and a Ph.D. in computer science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2002. He completed postdoctoral training in neuroimaging at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Medical School, then served on the faculty at Harvard Medical School and Weill Medical College of Cornell University before joining UGA in 2008.

At UGA, Professor Liu works across computing, bioimaging, bioinformatics, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. His group combines computational models, large-scale biomedical data, and machine learning to study the organization of the human brain and to build more capable and accountable intelligent systems.

Research program

His earlier work established computational approaches for cortical folding, structural and functional brain mapping, individualized connectivity landmarks, and large-scale functional-network analysis. These methods connect brain anatomy, connectivity, and function and support research on neurological and psychiatric disorders.

Current directions extend that foundation to brain-inspired artificial intelligence, large language models and agents, multimodal biomedical foundation models, artificial general intelligence, and quantum or hybrid quantum-classical AI. A recurring goal is to translate principles learned from human intelligence into systems that reason across modalities while remaining useful in science, medicine, education, and the humanities.

Leadership and recognition

Professor Liu was elected to the AIMBE College of Fellows in 2018 for outstanding contributions to quantitative mapping of structural and functional brain architectures using neuroimaging data.

He is also a Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention Society (MICCAI) Fellow, recognized for significant contributions to the development of novel biomedical image analysis methods and tools.

• Former member, MICCAI Society Board of Directors
• General Chair, MICCAI 2019
• Editor-in-Chief, Meta-Radiology
• Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
• Editorial service for IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, Medical Image Analysis, IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, IEEE Reviews in Biomedical Engineering, and IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics

His other honors include the UGA Creative Research Medal, the UGA Distinguished Research Professor title, an NIH Career Award, and an NSF CAREER Award.

Selected directions

• Large language models, agent memory, reasoning, and multimodal learning
• Brain-inspired AI and computational models of general intelligence
• Structural and functional neuroimaging, connectivity, and brain mapping
• Multimodal biomedical AI and AI for medicine
• Quantum and hybrid quantum-classical machine learning