AICIP University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Director

Hairong Qi

Gonzalez Family Professor & Lab Director

Dr. Qi has led AICIP since founding the group after joining UT in 1999. Her work spans collaborative signal and information processing, computer vision and machine learning, and remote sensing — from mobile-agent-based sensor networks to today's multimodal foundation models.

Website hqi@utk.edu Google Scholar DBLP ORCID CV

Portrait of Dr. Hairong Qi

Hairong Qi is the Gonzalez Family Professor in the Min H. Kao Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she directs the Advanced Imaging and Collaborative Information Processing (AICIP) Lab. She received her Ph.D. in computer engineering from North Carolina State University in 1999, after B.S. (1992) and M.S. (1995) degrees in computer science from Northern JiaoTong University in Beijing. She joined UT as an assistant professor in 1999, was promoted to associate professor in 2005 and professor in 2011, and was named to the Gonzalez Family Professorship in 2014.

Her research asks how reliable information can be extracted from imperfect, distributed, and heterogeneous observations. That question has carried the lab from mobile-agent-based collaborative processing in wireless sensor networks — the work cited in her elevation to IEEE Fellow — through hyperspectral image analysis and unmixing, to current efforts in multimodal machine learning, self-supervised representation learning for remote sensing, and AI systems for health and scientific discovery. She has published over 200 technical papers in archival journals and refereed conference proceedings, and her research has been supported by NSF, DARPA, IARPA, ONR, NASA, NIH, DOE, and DHS, among others.

At UT, Dr. Qi is the faculty lead of the university’s Foundational Artificial Intelligence cluster hiring initiative and one of the faculty leaders of ATHENA, the $20M NSF-funded testbed for AI-driven automated materials discovery announced in 2026.

Selected awards & honors

  • IEEE Fellow (2018), for contributions to collaborative signal processing in sensor networks
  • NSF CAREER Award (2005)
  • Highest Impact Paper Award, IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (2012)
  • Best Paper Awards at ICPR 2006, ACM/IEEE ICDSC 2009, and IEEE WHISPERS 2015; Top 10% Paper at IEEE ICIP 2015
  • Research Achievement Award, Tickle College of Engineering (2021)
  • Chancellor’s Award for Research and Creative Achievement, UT (2017); Chancellor’s Award for Professional Promise (2004)
  • Alumni Hall of Fame, NC State ECE (2017)
  • Gonzalez Family Endowed Professorship (2014); Min Kao Faculty Fellowship (2006)

Books

Both co-authored with Wesley E. Snyder and published by Cambridge University Press:

Service

Dr. Qi has served as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (2018–2021), on the editorial board of IEEE MultiMedia, and on the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Multimedia Signal Processing Technical Committee. Within EECS she served as Graduate Coordinator (2010–2012) and Associate Department Head for Academic Affairs (2017–2018). She has advised the UT EcoCAR vehicle-autonomy team across the DOE EcoCAR Mobility Challenge and the current EcoCAR Innovation Challenge.

Projects

Publications