He holds a doctor's degree from Jyvaskyla University in Finland.
Professor Tai's research fields mainly include numerical methods for partial differential equations (PDEs), inverse problems, optimization, computer vision, image processing and data science.
Professor Tai and his collaborators have made great contributions to computational mathematics, especially in the fields of numerical analysis and image processing. He is one of the inventors of AOS (additive operator splitting) algorithm, which has become a very popular algorithm in image processing using partial differential equations because of its efficiency and stability. He has also contributed several innovative algorithms in numerical analysis and research. His "obstacle problem algorithm" is "the first algorithm that has been proved to have the convergence speed of multigrid". He has also co-invented several new finite element methods for some singular perturbed PDEs which has been applied in practical engineering simulations.
Professor Tai is also engaged in research in image processing and adapt analysis. A general framework for solving inverse problems using level set methods is proposed, which has been extended to a large class of problems include shape optimization. He proposed PCLSM (piecewise constant level set method), as well as new geometric models for higher-order filters for image processing. He has made outstanding contributions to the maximum-flow problems and the fast algorithms for complex nonlinear partial differential equations.
Scientific Activities:
Professor Tai has worked as Chief Research Scientist and Executive Program Director at Hong Kong Centre for Cerebro-cardiovascular Health Engineering (COCHE). He was a chair Professor and Head at the Department of Mathematics at Hong Kong Baptist University (China). Before 2017, he served as Professor at the Department of Mathematics at Bergen University (Norway) and Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). He has also worked as adjunct Professor at Norwegian national centre of excellence CMA (Centre of Mathematics for Applications) and CIPR (Centre of Integrated Petroleum Research) .
Professor Tai has served in Editor Board for: SIAM Journal on Imaging Science, (2018-now), Co-Editor in Chief, Advances in Continuous and Discrete Models: Theory and (June 2021 – now), Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision (JMIV) (2017-now), Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering: Imaging (1997 – now); The East Asia Journal on Applied Mathematics (EAJAM) (2010 - now);
Inverse Problems and Imaging (2008 - now);
International Journal of Numerical analysis and modeling (2004 - now); Executive editor for Numerical Mathematics: Theory, Methods and Applications (NM-TMA) (2005 - 2021).
As of January 2023 Professor Tai has published in top international journals such as SIAM J. Sci. Comput., International Journal of Computer Vision, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, SIAM J. Numer. Anal. and CVPR. More than 250 papers have been published by him.
Professor Tai has served as the chairman of several international conferences, and has been invited to give conference talks many times. He has served as editor and executive editor in many internationally renowned journals such as SIAM Journal on Imaging Sciences, Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision, Inverse Problems and Imaging, International Journal of Numerical analysis and modelling, Numerical Mathematics: Theory, Methods and Applications, Advances in Numerical Analysis.
