Chih Lai

Chih Lai is a Professor in the Graduate Program in Software at the University of St. Thomas. He holds a PhD from Oregon State University and has extensive industry experience, including leading software engineering projects at Garmin and Medtronic. His research focuses on AI/ML applications in healthcare, multimedia data analysis, and precision agriculture, supported by grants from NSF, Amazon, and industry partners.

Education: PhD in Computer Science (Oregon State University, 1999), MS in Computer Science (Oregon State University), BA in Fu-Jen Catholic University, Taiwan.

Research interests include AI-driven medical imaging, counterfeit detection, and brain neural connectome analysis. His work on in-memory analysis of brain connectivity graphs was supported by Amazon and SAP HANA.

Awards:

• Medtronic Idea Disclosure Contributor Award (2013)
• Best Paper Award in ACM Multimedia Data Mining (2006)
• Aerospace Industry Pioneer Award (2000)
• Deutsch Fellowship (2019)

Grants & Collaborations:

• $1.3M+ funding from NSF, Minnesota State, German government, and Amazon
• Projects with Mayo Clinic, University of Minnesota, and Medtronic
• Amazon Cloud Research Grants for brain connectome and in-memory computing

Labs & Teams: Collaborates with the Helmholtz-Zentrum für Umweltforschung (Germany) and leads interdisciplinary teams at UST's Center for Applied AI.