About Me

Hi! I’m Chih-Yu (Andrew) Lai.

I’m a Ph.D. student living in Cambridge, MA, USA, currently looking for a 2023 summer internship focused on doing research in AI. I have a great interest in developing innovative software and hardware related to AI and ML, so I am very excited to create this website for sharing my projects and experience with you.

I had been profoundly inspired by programming when I was young. In junior high school, I self-learned Visual Basic and wrote several programs, with one of them winning the first prize in a science fair competition. In senior high school, I learned C/C++ along with algorithms and data structures and entered the 2^nd stage (5~10^th place) in Taiwan Olympiad in Informatics (TOI). This series of events firmly established my programming skills.

As a person with a programming background, the devices I constructed possess vivid and complex functionality. In college, I majored in bio-mechatronics and attained relevant skills for completing a variety of projects. I teamed up with schoolmates for developing an aroma alarm clock that can awake people using a specific fragrance and earned 40,000NTD in a fundraising event. During this period, I acquired PCB layout skills and the ability for practical use of microcontrollers, IC chips along with different electronic components. I have lots of practical experience in machine learning and data mining using neural networks (Python+Tensorflow) and won first prize in a big data analysis competition held by TSMC. I also have experience in designing digital logic circuits using Verilog learned during college.

My research topic during my master’s degree focused on interdigitated array electrode chips applied to electrochemical impedimetric biosensing. I learned the complete microfabrication process for microelectrodes and microfluidic chips, utilized Raspberry Pi for developing a wireless and miniaturized website-controlled impedance detection device, and applied those to my own research. Accordingly, I wrote two full research articles as the first author and published them in a Q1 international journal (Electrochimica Acta). After graduation, I worked as a research assistant in our lab and led a research team for developing miniaturized bio-sensing platforms.

I have also worked as a layout designer in TSMC, which is the world’s largest dedicated independent (pure-play) semiconductor foundry and the 13^th largest company in the world by market value as of 2022. I constructed an end-to-end automated system that can generate optimized standard cells by integrating a transistor placer, DRC error-Less Cell Automated Router (DLCAR), and a machine learning-based PPA estimator. DLCAR is a functional block-based standard cell routing system that can generate functional and commercially manufacturable standard cell libraries for the N3 process node within a few minutes. These projects led me to win a total of 5 awards in TSMC (see Honors and Awards below). I had also been pioneering in standard cell structure definition for the initial development stage of world-class technology nodes, with 13 US patent applications for 3D IC and advanced structures in progress.

Now, I study as a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, which is ranked among the top academic institutions in the world. The research topics that I am working on include machine learning and quantitative modeling on time series and computer vision.

[Download Resume]

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Honors and Awards