Tai-Sing Lee

Dr. Tai-Sing Lee is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, with affiliations in the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC) and the Machine Learning Department. He holds adjunct roles at the University of Pittsburgh's Neuroscience Department. His research focuses on computational neuroscience, visual perception, and the intersection of biological and machine intelligence. Lee earned his S.B. from Harvard (1986), and dual Ph.D.s from Harvard (1993) and MIT (1993), followed by postdoctoral training at Harvard and MIT. He leads the Lee Lab for Biological and Machine Intelligence Research and directs programs such as the Peking University-CMU and Tsinghua-CMU summer programs in Computer Science.

His research investigates computational principles of visual perception, leveraging neurophysiological, mathematical, and machine learning approaches. Key areas include statistical modeling of neural codes, learning/adaptation mechanisms in neural systems, and Bayesian inference frameworks. Lee has developed novel machine learning techniques for analyzing neural data, including studies on V1/V2/V4 neural coding and hierarchical perceptual inference.

Lee has advised numerous Ph.D., M.S., and undergraduate students, many of whom pursued academic or tech careers. His honors include the NSF CAREER Award (2000) and ICCV Helmholtz Prize (2013). His lab’s projects include the MICrONS initiative to reverse-engineer brain algorithms and collaborations on predictive coding models in vision and music perception.