Myron Lai

Lead projects

• 
  Health · Hardware

  A heart monitor for survivors of a rare heart attack

  A chest-strap sensor and Android app that warns survivors of spontaneous coronary artery dissection (SCAD) when exercise is pushing their heart too hard, judged against their own baseline.

  1st Place, Los Angeles County Science & Engineering Fair · U.S. patent pending
• 
  Disaster response

  EvacuationHub

  A disaster-alert and evacuation-routing site I built after the Woolsey and Palisades fires, so residents can see what is happening near them and find a safe way out.

  553 registered users · 2nd Place, Congressional App Challenge
• 
  Research · Open data

  Los Angeles County Wildfire Equity Dataset

  An open dataset and map that lines up the 2025 fire perimeters with household income across about 6,600 neighborhoods (census block groups), so anyone can see who the fires hit.

  Published on Harvard Dataverse
• 67Los Angeles-area data centers inventoried, 42 modeled for water, energy and grid impact
  Research · Carnegie Institution

  Data centers, water and power in Los Angeles

  A research study with Dr. Lorenzo Rosa at the Carnegie Institution for Science estimating how much water and electricity the region's data centers use, and where that burden lands.

  67 data centers inventoried · 42 modeled

More projects

• Lumina

  An iPhone and web app that suggests safer walking routes using 470,000 segments of public crime data. I documented how police-report data steers people away from the blocks police watch most.

• RiskMesh

  A platform that predicts how Southern California disasters can set each other off, such as a heat wave straining the power grid, using live data from NASA and federal weather, earthquake and energy agencies.

• EnviGuard and my backyard climate station

  A six-language app that turns local air-quality and heat readings into plain safety advice, fed by a Raspberry Pi weather station I built and have run in my backyard since August 2026.

• StudyPlatform

  A free tutoring platform I built and run that pairs students with tutors.

  260+ service hours

• AccessMate

  An accessibility app that uses the camera to describe surroundings in real time, and a wearable helmet design that does the same in all directions.

  Taiwan patent granted · Congressional App Challenge recognition

Research

• Research Intern, Humanistic Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Lab, University of WashingtonJun 2026 to present

  In Dr. Bo Zhao's lab I built the surface-temperature layer for the Seattle City Light Mapping Hub, which maps the city's power outages since 2011 with attention to who is affected. I paired the utility's grid-restoration records with the Social Vulnerability Index, and the Hub is now on the Seattle city government's internal site. I also built a 3D Seattle heat map and explored 3D views of power-grid data for an earthquake study funded by the National Science Foundation.

• Student Researcher, Carnegie Institution for ScienceJun 2026 to present

  With Dr. Lorenzo Rosa (Department of Global Ecology), I inventoried 67 Los Angeles-area data centers and modeled water and energy demand, and grid impact, for 42 of them. More about the study.

• Academic Year Research Intern, Stanford UniversitySep 2026 to present

  Mentored research under Lilian Chen at the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine & Imaging (AIMI), Stanford School of Medicine, on AI tools for visually impaired people, designed around what the users themselves need.

• Summer Research Intern, Stanford AIMISummer 2026

  I built a pipeline that finds pneumonia on chest X-rays and marks where it is, trained on my own graphics card under strict limits on how often we could submit. My team, Team Falcons, finished 1st on the Kaggle leaderboard and 3rd of 7 teams overall.

• Engineering Summer Academy at Penn, RoboticsSummer 2024

  Earned an A+ building a machine that plays the recorder on its own, programmed in C++ with custom printed circuit boards and sensors.

• U.S. Army Gains in the Education of Mathematics and Science (GEMS) IIISummer 2024

  A research curriculum at Joint Forces Training Base, Los Alamitos, covering neuroscience, biochemistry, biomechanics and physics, where I built digital-circuit prototypes and explored virtual reality.

• Invited Peer Reviewer, IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology ConferenceMay 2026

  Reviewed 3 submitted papers on AI in healthcare and civic technology for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) conference.

Publications and patents

• IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference, sole authorOct 2026

  "A Personalized Heart Rate Variability Based Framework for Wearable Monitoring of Exercise-Induced Cardiovascular Stress." I am presenting it on Oct 8, 2026.

• U.S. Patent Application 19/708,837 (pending)Jun 2026

  Personalized cardiovascular resilience and physiological monitoring system.

• Taiwan Utility Model M676830 (granted)Nov 2025

  Smart AI helmet for real-time environmental perception and description.

• Los Angeles County Wildfire Equity Dataset, Harvard DataverseAug 2026

  Sole author. Public domain, doi.org/10.7910/DVN/2R57BG.

Other things I've built

• SpateAug 2026

  Estimates, for each small watershed on Southern California burn scars, how likely a coming storm is to set off a deadly mudslide like Montecito's in 2018. Replaying that storm, it matched 119 of the 120 recorded debris flows, though its overall accuracy still trails the official U.S. Geological Survey product.

• PSPS Equity MapJul 2026

  Asks whether California's wildfire-season Public Safety Power Shutoffs fall harder on disadvantaged communities. Inside high fire-threat areas they do (64% of disadvantaged census tracts were shut off, against 44% of others), but statewide the pattern reverses. I sent the findings to California Public Utilities Commission staff on Sep 25, 2026.

• LA Equity AtlasJun 2026

  Maps 147,009 illegal-dumping reports to Los Angeles's 311 line against neighborhood vulnerability. The most vulnerable fifth of neighborhoods file 3.4 times as many reports per tract, yet the city responds slightly faster there (a median of 51 hours, against 66).

• TidewatchSep 2026

  An hourly swimming-risk score for 11 Southern California beaches, built from ocean buoys, surf forecasts and water-quality grades. Missing data never counts as low risk.

• HumanWalkJun 2026

  A Minecraft mod whose character walks to a goal the way a person does, using a small neural network trained to imitate recorded human play. It reached 40 of 40 goals, and a test classifier rated its movement 0.973 humanlike, against 0.980 for real players.

Leadership and activities

• Founder & President, Viewpoint AI ClubSep 2025 to present

  I started the school's first AI club and run weekly workshops on generative AI, ethics and machine learning. More than 150 students signed up at the fall 2026 club fair.

• Co-Founder & Co-Leader, Cybersecurity ClubSep 2025 to present

  I wrote a network-defense curriculum and run weekly lectures and practice competitions. At Carnegie Mellon's picoCTF 2026 hacking competition our team placed 12th in the U.S. of 1,344 teams.

• Speaker, Viewpoint World Ready WeekFeb 2026

  With Shaurya Toor I gave "We Opened Pandora's Box, Now What?", the event's first-ever AI presentation, to 60+ people, its largest session attendance to date. I built live interactive pieces for it, including a deepfake-detection game.

• Team Captain & Lead Software Engineer, FIRST Tech Challenge RoboticsSep 2023 to Jun 2025

  Led two competition seasons and wrote the robot's autonomous path-planning code in Java. We qualified for Regionals, and my coach nominated me as a FIRST Dean's List Semi-Finalist (2025).

• Coach & Mentor, FIRST LEGO League RoboticsSep 2023 to present

  I coach younger students' robotics teams, which reached the World Championship (winning the Core Values Award) and West Edge International. I also organized outreach at the Discovery Cube Science Center.

• Varsity Swim Team2018 to present

  Our team won the 2025 Gold Coast League title, its 21st in a row. I hold the #1 school rank in the 500-yard freestyle.

• School Orchestra2019 to present

  Our string ensemble has won 3 1st Place Division Championships at regional competitions.

Honors

• 1st Place, Applied Computational Science, and Grand Award Finalist, Los Angeles County Science & Engineering Fair (1st of 40 in category, top 17 of 800+ projects)Mar 2026
• 1st Alternate, International Science and Engineering Fair2026
• picoCTF, Carnegie Mellon: 12th in the U.S. of 1,344 teams, 25th globally of 8,747Mar 2026
• Honor Award, AI Youth Elite Summit, App-development TrackFeb 2026
• Belonging and Community Life Award, Recognition of LeadershipFeb 2026
• Conrad Innovator, Conrad ChallengeJan 2026
• 5th Place globally, World Artificial Intelligence Competition for Youth, AI ShowcaseNov 2025
• 2nd Place in school, American Mathematics Competition 12BNov 2025
• 4th Place, MetroCode coding contestNov 2025
• Congressional App Challenge: 2nd Place for EvacuationHub, App Recognition for AccessMateNov 2025, Nov 2024
• Bronze Medal, Kaggle "Make Data Count" (top 8%, 99th of 1,282 teams)Sep 2025
• 1st Place (Senior Group), Amazon Web Services DeepRacer AI Championship, twiceMay 2024, May 2025
• Gold, President's Volunteer Service Award (260+ verified hours)2024
• Gold Division Qualifier, USA Computing OlympiadDec 2023

About

I live in Calabasas and have been at Viewpoint since third grade. I speak English and Chinese natively and Spanish well (I took AP Spanish). Most of the apps linked on this site run on a server I set up and maintain myself, which is why their addresses end in myrondomain.com.

Away from a screen I swim, play in the orchestra, go to concerts and play pickleball.

The best way to reach me is projectmyronl@gmail.com.