Yuichi Motai is currently an assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, USA.

He was born in 1967 in Japan, studied in both Japan and USA, and completed his Ph.D. with the Robot Vision Laboratory in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana in 2002.

His first laboratory work was in Biomedical Instrumentation Laboratory at Keio University in 1990-1991, where he wrote his bachelor thesis on a psycho-physiological experiment; color matching between computer display and actual object. He wrote his master thesis on 3D object reconstruction by depth from focus using a single camera at Image Informatics laboratory at Kyoto University in 1991-1993. He then spent 4 years as a tenured research scientist in an industrial laboratory called Intelligent Systems Lab, image processing division, where he built an infrared image sensing systems for detecting human's behavior.

In 1997, he started working for his Ph.D. in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. His thesis was on 3D robot vision system for acquiring an object model with human-computer interaction framework. He spent more than 3 years on this project, which was funded by Ford Motor Company, and completed to write for journal publications in 2002.

He has been selected prestigious 9 fellowships and 2 awards, and invited more than 20 talks from the top universities and research companies. He has supervised 12 graduate students (including currently enrolling 6 Ph.D. students), and has published 30 journals and conferences papers. His research interests are in the broad area of computational intelligence; especially of computer vision, human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, robotic teaching, image synthesis, and smart sensing.

His favorites are alpine ski and golf. He was married in 1997 and currently lives with his wife with a new born son in 2006 at Burlington, Vermont, USA.