Projects

What we're building

Funded efforts and sustained research threads, current and past. Each page collects the people, papers, code, and sponsors behind the work.

active 2025–present

FujiView

Will you see Mount Fuji tomorrow? FujiView fuses live webcam imagery with weather data to forecast scenic visibility — published at WACV 2026.

multimodal fusion · forecasting · vision in the wild

active 2023–present

MUSICARE-VR

Music intervention in virtual reality that adapts to a person with dementia in real time — with reinforcement learning and AI agents driving socially assistive robots.

virtual reality · reinforcement learning · assistive robotics

Architecture diagram of Cross-Scale MAE showing multi-scale masked autoencoder branches with cross-scale consistency objectives.

active 2022–present

Representation Learning

From Cross-Scale MAE to ExPLoRe — a sustained line of work on learning visual representations without labels, published at NeurIPS 2023 and ECCV 2026.

self-supervised learning · masked image modeling · vision transformers

active 2026–2030

ATHENA

A $20M NSF-funded testbed making UT a hub in the national network of AI-powered cloud laboratories for accelerated materials discovery — with Dr. Qi as one of three faculty leaders.

autonomous experimentation · materials science · scientific AI

active 2024–present

Koopman Dynamics

Treating neural network training as a dynamical system — predicting weights epochs ahead to accelerate optimization, and stabilizing policy learning in RL.

Koopman operator theory · optimization · reinforcement learning

active

Hyperspectral Imaging

A two-decade signature strength — decomposing each pixel's spectrum into its constituent materials, from award-winning NMF methods to generative unmixing.

hyperspectral unmixing · super-resolution · remote sensing

active 2018–present

EcoCAR

Radar–camera fusion research for connected and autonomous vehicles, and faculty leadership of UT's team in the DOE EcoCAR competitions.

autonomous vehicles · sensor fusion · student competition

active 2022–present

Precision Agriculture

Low-cost vision and sensing for animal welfare — tracking broiler-chicken behaviors and managing dairy-herd disease with USDA-funded UT collaborations.

agricultural AI · animal welfare · IoT sensing

completed 2021–2024

IARPA SMART

Automating the analysis of Landsat, Sentinel, and WorldView imagery to detect and characterize large-scale change anywhere on Earth.

satellite imagery · change detection · remote sensing

completed 2022–2024

EASIER

A distributed indoor air-quality monitoring and alert platform for under-served elder homes, piloted through TVA's Connected Communities initiative.

environmental sensing · health equity · distributed systems

completed 2000–2012

Sensor Networks

The lab's founding research program — mobile-agent-based distributed inference across resource-constrained sensor networks, cited in Dr. Qi's IEEE Fellow elevation.

sensor networks · distributed computing · mobile agents

completed 2017–2021

UTKFace

The widely used UTKFace dataset and the conditional adversarial autoencoder behind it — age progression and regression learned from 20,000+ faces.

face analysis · generative models · datasets