ZGCA

Zhongguancun Academy (ZGCA, 中关村学院) and the Zhongguancun Institute of Artificial Intelligence (ZGCI) form a Beijing-government-backed AI research consortium operating under a "one body, two institutes" model. ZGCA was founded September 13, 2024 as a joint Ministry of Education + Beijing Municipality higher education institution. ZGCI was founded October 28, 2024 under the Beijing Municipal Science & Technology Commission as a national-level applied research institute.

Leadership has been described as "Microsoft Research Asia AI4Science 2.0" — the institution recruited an extraordinary concentration of ex-MSR talent. President Liu Tieyan (Tie-Yan Liu) (97K+ citations, IEEE/ACM/AAIA Fellow) was Distinguished Scientist at MSR AI4Science and previously Assistant Managing Director at MSR Asia. Vice President Tao Qin (41K+ citations, 2025 ACM Fellow) led MSR AI for Science Asia. Executive VP Bin Dong is concurrently Boya Distinguished Professor at Peking University. ZGCI President Bin Shao founded MSR's Computational Biology and Scientific Computing Research Groups. Deputy Director Shuxin Zheng headed Microsoft Scientific Foundation Models.

The institution's flagship achievement is the AI-Driven Agentic Design Platform for Tumor Immunotherapy Drugs: candidate Z212 (entirely AI-generated) achieved 83.7% tumor growth inhibition in mouse models and advanced to Preclinical Candidate stage, compressing the design pipeline from years to 6 months. Other research includes MorphoBench (adaptive reasoning benchmark), MegaDFT (Kohn-Sham DFT scaled to 100K atoms), RLinf (open-source RL for embodied AI), and an ICML 2025 SeePhys Challenge win beating Gemini 2.5 and o3. Partnerships include 31 universities (Tsinghua, Harbin Institute of Technology) and CASIA joint PhD programs.

ZGCA and ZGCI share a campus at Haidian Dayue Information Technology Park (No. 17 Daniufang Second Ring Road, Haidian District, Beijing). Together with BAAI (founded 2018, headquartered ~15 km southeast in Wudaokou near Tsinghua), they form a complementary triad in Beijing's Haidian District AI ecosystem: BAAI focuses on foundational infrastructure (BGE embeddings, FlagOS computing stack, Aquila/Tele-FLM LLMs, the WuJie multimodal/embodied series), while ZGCA drives talent cultivation and AI-for-Science research and ZGCI drives applied industrial research (drug discovery, embodied AI, robotics). The two institutions operate independently — no documented co-authored papers or interlocking leadership — but compete and collaborate within the same ecosystem of partners (Tsinghua, PKU, Infinigence AI) and present at the annual Zhongguancun Forum.