Professor Mohan Kankanhalli

Deputy Executive Chairman (Talent)

Professor Mohan Kankanhalli is the Deputy Executive Chairman (Talent) of AI Singapore. He currently holds the distinguished position of Provost’s Chair Professor of Computer Science and is also the Director of NUS AI Institute.

He was formerly the Dean of NUS School of Computing from 2016 to 2022. Prior to becoming the Dean, he was the NUS Vice Provost (Graduate Education) during 2014-2016 and Associate Provost (Graduate Education) during 2011-2013. Earlier, he was the Vice-Dean for Academic Affairs & Graduate Studies at the NUS School of Computing during 2008-2010 and Vice-Dean for Research during 2001-2007. He was a faculty member at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore during 1997-1998 and a researcher at Institute of Systems Science of NUS during 1990-1997. Mohan obtained his BTech (Electrical Engineering) from IIT Kharagpur and MS & PhD (Computer & Systems Engineering) from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Mohan’s research interests are in Multimedia Computing, Computer Vision and Multimedia Security & Privacy. He has made fundamental contributions in the area of multimedia & vision – image and video understanding, multimodal fusion, visual saliency as well as in multimedia security – content authentication, privacy and trustworthy AI. He is actively involved in the multimedia research community organizing conferences and was the Director of Conferences for ACM SIG Multimedia during 2009-2013. He is on the editorial boards of several journals including ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications, Springer Multimedia Systems, IEEE Multimedia, and Springer Journal on Big Data.

He directs N-CRiPT (NUS Centre for Research in Privacy Technologies) which conducts research on privacy on structured as well as unstructured (multimedia, sensors, IoT) data. N-CRiPT looks at privacy at both individual and organizational levels along the entire data life cycle. He is personally involved in privacy research related to images and video as well as privacy risk management. N-CRiPT, which has been funded by Singapore’s National Research Foundation, works with many industry, government and academic partners. He earlier directed the SeSaMe (Sensor-enhanced Social Media) Centre during 2012-2018.  SeSaMe did fundamental exploration of social cyber-physical systems with applications in social sensing, sensor analytics and smart systems.

Mohan is a member of World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the Future of Artificial Intelligence.

Mohan is a Fellow of SNAS (Singapore National Academy of Science) and IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers).