The Team | AI Singapore

Management

Professor Ho Teck Hua

Executive Chairman, AI Singapore

Professor Ho Teck Hua is the senior deputy president and provost at the National University of Singapore (NUS), where he is a Tan Chin Tuan Centennial Professor. He is also the executive chairman of AI Singapore, a national research and development programme, and chairman of the Singapore Data Science Consortium.

Teck is a prominent behavioural scientist with a PhD in decision sciences from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering with first class honours, a master’s degree in computer and information sciences from NUS, and a master’s degree in decision sciences from the Wharton School.

In 2011, he took a part-time appointment at NUS as vice president of research strategy, and became director of the NUS Centre for Behavioural Economics. In 2015, he became deputy president of research and technology at NUS. Prior to his role as deputy president, Teck was the William Halford Jr Family Professor of Marketing at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. In 1999, he earned tenure in the marketing department at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Before that, he was assistant professor of operations and technology management at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Teck has published many significant works in refereed journals in the areas of behavioural economics, management science, and marketing. He was the first non-US citizen to be editor-in-chief of Management Science, the venerable flagship journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, and one of the top journals for research in management. He has also been an associate editor for the Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, and a co-editor for Foundations and Trends in Marketing.

At the Haas School of Business, Teck received the 2015 Williamson Award, the School’s highest faculty award, named in honour of Oliver Williamson, the recipient of the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. The award celebrates honourees who best reflect the character and integrity associated with Williamson’s scholarly work and legacy.

Professor Mohan Kankanhalli

Deputy Executive Chairman, AI Singapore

Prof. Mohan Kankanhalli is the Dean of NUS School of Computing and Provost’s Chair Professor of Computer Science. He is also the Deputy Executive Chairman of AI Singapore.

Prior to becoming the Dean in 2016, 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 and privacy. He is actively involved in the multimedia research community organising 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 Fellow of SNAS (Singapore National Academy of Science) and IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers).

Professor Chen Tsuhan

Chief Scientist

Prof. Chen Tsuhan is the Chief Scientist for AI Singapore and is responsible for AI Singapore’s fundamental research into artificial intelligence.

He is a renowned expert in pattern recognition, computer vision and machine learning. He joined NUS from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, United States, where he had been the David E. Burr Professor of Engineering since 2009. From 2009 to 2013, when he served as Director, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell, he promoted the School to top ranking positions and launched several initiatives to boost innovation as well as foster research and teaching excellence. He also directed the Advanced Multimedia Processing Laboratory. From 1997 to 2008, Prof Chen was a Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, where he served as the Associate Department Head from 2007 to 2008.

He was the Cheng Tsang Man Chair Professor and Dean of the College of Engineering (CoE) at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) from 2015 to 2017. He championed faculty recruitment and pioneered support schemes at the NTU CoE to encourage inter-school multidisciplinary programmes, aligned with the domain areas identified in RIE2020.

He was appointed the Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Transactions on Multimedia in 2002-2004. He was elected to the Board of Governors, 2007-2009, and a Distinguished Lecturer, 2007-2008, both with the IEEE Signal Processing Society.

He received the Charles Wilts Prize for outstanding independent research at the California Institute of Technology in 1993. He was a recipient of the US National Science Foundation CAREER Award from 2000 to 2003. He received the Benjamin Richard Teare Teaching Award in 2006, the Eta Kappa Nu Award for Outstanding Faculty Teaching in 2007, both at the Carnegie Mellon University, and the Michael Tien Teaching Award in 2014 at the Cornell University.

Prof Chen has published more than 300 technical papers and holds close to 30 US patents. He is a member of the Phi Tau Phi Scholastic Honor Society, a Fellow of IEEE, and a Fellow of the Institute of Engineers, Singapore. He earned his PhD degree in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA, in 1993.

A/Prof Bryan Low

Director, AI Research

Dr. Bryan Low is the Director of AI Research at AI Singapore and an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore. He obtained the B.Sc. (Hons.) and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from National University of Singapore, Singapore, in 2001 and 2002, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2009. His research interests include probabilistic & automated machine learning, planning under uncertainty, and multi-agent/robot systems.

Dr. Low is the recipient of the (1) Andrew P. Sage Best Transactions Paper Award for the best paper published in all 3 of the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics – Parts A, B, and C in 2006; (2) National University of Singapore Overseas Graduate Scholarship for Ph.D. studies in Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in 2004-2009; (3) Singapore Computer Society Prize for Best M.Sc. Thesis in School of Computing, National University of Singapore in 2003; and (4) Faculty Teaching Excellence Award in School of Computing, National University of Singapore in 2017-2018.

Dr. Low has served as a World Economic Forum’s Global Future Councils Fellow for the Council on the Future of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics from Sep 2016 to Jun 2018 and an IEEE Robotics & Automation Society (RAS) Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Multi-Robot Systems in Mar 2019. He has served as an organizing chair for the IEEE RAS Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems in Jun 2016, the AI Summer Schools in Jul 2019 and Aug 2020, and the NeurIPS 2021 Workshop on New Frontiers in Federated Learning. Dr. Low has also served as associate editors, area chairs and program committee members, and reviewers for premier AI (specifically, multiagent systems, AI planning, robotics, machine learning) conferences: IJCAI, AAAI, ECAI, AAMAS, ICAPS, RSS, IROS, ICRA, CoRL, NeurIPS, ICML, AISTATS, ICLR and journals: TKDE, JMLR, JAIR, MLJ, TNNLS, T-ASE, IJRR, T-RO, AURO, JFR, TOSN, JAAMAS. He was the top 5% reviewer for ICML 2019, top 33% reviewer for ICML 2020, and an expert reviewer for ICML 2021.

Professor Ng See Kiong

Director, AI Technology

Prof. Ng See-Kiong is the Director of AI Technology at AI Singapore with the mission to promote bold ideas and innovative approaches to solve national challenges which can be effectively addressed by AI to create significant economic and social impact with technologies. See-Kiong is also a Professor of Practice of Computer Science at the School of Computing, National University of Singapore (NUS), and the Director of Translation Research of the university’s Institute of Data Science. The Institute is the focal point at NUS for developing integrated data science capabilities for real-world impact and nurturing data scientists for Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative.

See-Kiong received the Singapore National Computer Board’s overseas scholarship in 1986. He earned both his BS (1989) and PhD (1998) in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), with an MSE in Computer and Information Science (Artificial Intelligence) from University of Pennsylvania (1990). His lifelong research mission is to push the boundary of data science and artificial intelligence through transdisciplinary upstream research, and creates impact by translating the research outcomes into real-life applications through collaborating with partners from the industry and public agencies.

Prior to joining NUS, See-Kiong was the Programme Director of the Urban Systems at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), a pioneering research program that developed technologies and innovations for smart cities, and the founding department head of the highly successful Data Analytics Department at A*STAR’s Institute for Infocomm Research. See-Kiong started his research career as one of the early bioinformaticians, and he has since been crossing over into many other disciplines as a seasoned AI scientist. He has published widely, with around 130 research papers in leading peer-reviewed journals and conferences across multiple disciplines to-date.

From using the computation of data to better understand the biology of the human body, See-Kiong is now using machine learning and artificial intelligence to understand the “biology” of complex human cities and societies and solving real-world grand challenges with bold innovations of AI technologies.

Laurence Liew

Director, AI Innovation

Laurence Liew is the Director for AI Innovation at AI Singapore and is driving the adoption of AI by the Singapore ecosystem through the 100 Experiments, AI Apprenticeship programmes and the various AI Makerspace initiatives.

A visionary and serial technopreneur, Laurence identified and introduced Singapore’s enterprises to:

Linux and open source in 1999, by being the first RED HAT partner and authorized training centre in Asia Pacific
• High Performance Computing (HPC) Cluster in 2001, by building A-STAR’s IHPC first compute cluster (most of the initial HPC clusters in NUS, NTU, SMU were built by Laurence and his team)
• Grid Computing in 2003, by building and operating Singapore’s first Grid platform – IDA’s National Grid Pilot Platform
• Cloud Computing in 2007, by architecting both the Cloud business and technology for then Singapore Computer Systems’ Alatum Cloud (now owned by Singtel/NCS)
• Data Science with R in 2011, by building Revolution Analytics Inc business in Asia and R&D team in Singapore. Revolution Analytics was acquired by Microsoft in 2015

Laurence graduated from National University of Singapore (NUS) with First Class Honours in Engineering and holds a Masters in Knowledge Engineering from NUS.

Current Pro-bono appointments:

2021 – Co-chair of Innovations and Commercialization working group, Global Partnership for AI (GPAI), an OECD initiative

2020 – Chair of “SME Adoption of AI” working group under Innovations and Commercialization Group, Global Partnership for AI (GPAI), an OECD initiative

2020 – Scientific Panel Committee, Ministry of National Development

2019 – ITE Board of Governors

2019 – Chairman, AI Standards Technical Committee, ITSC, EnterpriseSG

2019 – Council member for the following schools (IT/Computing): Singapore Polytechnic, Republic Polytechnic, Nanyang Polytechnic

Previous Pro-bono appointments:

2019 to 2021 – Regional Director, Microsoft. Regional Directors acts as industry advisory experts to Microsoft leadership team. This is a 2-year pro-bono appointment by invitation only.

2018 to 2021 – Advisor, SGTECH AI+HPC Chapter

2018 – Technical Workgroup for IMDA National ICM Technology Roadmap – Track T4 (AI and Data, and Blockchain)

2013 to 2015 – Working Group Member, National Infocomm Media Masterplan 2025, Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore

2014 to 2019 – Transactions on Computational Sciences, Springer Journal Editorial Board

Dr Leslie Teo

Senior Director, AI Makerspace

Leslie is Senior Director of AI Makerspace at AI Singapore where he is tasked with catalysing the use of AI in businesses. He and his team work with companies to identify important use cases and build enabling AI products to support such use cases.

Leslie is passionate about data, data science, machine learning, and AI. He pivoted from a career in economics, finance, and investing in 2019. That year, he joined Grab as Head of Data Science, Policy, and Data Initiatives and Advisor to the CEO. In that role, he sought to answer critical business and social questions using data and build products that provided relevant insights, such as congestion patterns and creating safer bike paths. He helped lay the foundation for the data science and analytics role at Grab and Singtel’s digital bank (GxS).

After Grab, Leslie was Managing Director at Great Eastern Life Insurance for Data and Strategic Transformation. He and his team were responsible for enabling data analytics and data science across the organisation and fostering business transformation capabilities to deliver value in areas such as distribution, marketing, risk management and digital products.

Before Grab, Leslie was the Director of the Economics and Investment Strategy Department and Chief Economist at GIC Private Limited, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund. He oversaw the team responsible for asset allocation, total portfolio construction, systematic investing, and identifying critical long-term trends that would impact GIC’s portfolio. He remains an advisor to the government on reserve management issues.

Leslie was also at the International Monetary Fund. During his Fund career, he worked on financial sector restructuring, financial stability, public debt management, monetary policy and operations.

He was also Head of the Financial Surveillance Division at the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

Leslie has a strong belief in education. He was a Board member of the Pacific Pension and Investment Institute and the National University of Singapore. He was a Vice President of the Economic Society of Singapore, chaired the advisory board for NUS’ Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and advised NUS’ Investment Committee and Business School.

Leslie has a Liberal Arts and Sciences degree from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Economics and Finance from the University of Rochester. He has a Master’s in Information and Data Science from the University of California at Berkeley. In addition, he is a certified Financial Risk Manager and a CFA charter holder.

Professor Simon Chesterman

Senior Director, AI Governance

Prof. Simon Chesterman is Dean and Provost’s Chair Professor of the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law and Senior Director of AI Governance at AI Singapore. He is also Editor of the Asian Journal of International Law and Co-President of the Law Schools Global League.

Educated in Melbourne, Beijing, Amsterdam, and Oxford, Professor Chesterman’s teaching experience includes periods at the Universities of Melbourne, Oxford, Southampton, Columbia, and Sciences Po. From 2006-2011, he was Global Professor and Director of the New York University School of Law Singapore Programme. Prior to joining NYU, he was a Senior Associate at the International Peace Academy and Director of UN Relations at the International Crisis Group in New York. He has previously worked for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Yugoslavia and interned at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

Professor Chesterman is the author or editor of twenty-one books, including We, the Robots? Regulating Artificial Intelligence and the Limits of the Law (CUP, 2021); Law and Practice of the United Nations (with Ian Johnstone and David M. Malone, OUP, 2016); One Nation Under Surveillance (OUP, 2011); You, the People (OUP, 2004); and Just War or Just Peace? (OUP, 2001). He is a recognized authority on international law, whose work has opened up new areas of research on conceptions of public authority – including the rules and institutions of global governance, state- building and post-conflict reconstruction, the changing role of intelligence agencies, and the emerging role of artificial intelligence and big data. He also writes on legal education and higher education more generally, and is the author of four young adult fiction novels including the Raising Arcadia trilogy.

Dr Sintia Teddy-Ang

Director, Planning & Operations

Dr Sintia Teddy-Ang graduated with First Class Honours in Computer Engineering in 2003 from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and subsequently received her PhD from the same university in 2008.

She spent about 6 years in data analytics and computational intelligence-related research projects and consultancies in collaboration with both public and private industry sectors when she was with the Institute for Infomcomm Research (I2R), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) Singapore, from 2007-2013. Her key expertise was in data mining, intelligent systems and predictive analytics and their applications in addressing Business Analytics problems. She has published significant papers in internationally acclaimed journals and conferences such as IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, International Journal of Forecasting and IEEE Transactions on Reliability.

Dr Teddy-Ang joined NUS in June 2018 and she is currently the Director for Strategic and Synergetic Programmes at the Office of the Senior Deputy President and Provost, where she assists Provost with Research, Innovation, Academic and Admission related policies and programmes. She is concurrently the Director of Planning & Operations at AI Singapore (a national R&D Programme in Artificial Intelligence hosted at NUS), and Deputy Director of Strategy & Operations at NUS Centre for Trusted Internet and Community (CTIC).

Prior to NUS, she was the Deputy Director for Services and Digital Economy (SDE) directorate at the National Research Foundation (NRF), where she was responsible for the management and strategy development of R&D in SDE domain, with a vision to develop, integrate and leverage Singapore’s digital innovation capabilities to meet national priorities, raise productivity and support key services, create sustainable economic opportunities and high quality jobs. She was also leading the planning, strategising and implementation of national digital R&D programs such as AI Singapore and Singapore Data Science Consortium.

Dr Ben Leong

Chief Data Officer

Dr. Ben Leong is the Chief Data Officer (Technical) at AI Singapore. He is also concurrently Director of the AI Centre for Educational Technologies (AICET). The AICET develops pedagogy-centric software systems to support teaching and learning. The centre currently provides technical expertise and support to the Ministry of Education (MOE) in the development of a new AI-enabled Adaptive Learning System for Mathematics.

Dr. Leong is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the School of Computing, National University of Singapore (NUS). He received his S.B. (1997), M.Eng. (1997) and Ph.D. (2006) degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Since Mar 2021, Dr. Leong also been appointment as the Director for the Centre for Computing for Social Good and Philanthropy (CCSGP) at the School of Computing. The CCSGP aims to complement the technical training provided by the NUS School of Computing with opportunities to do good, by providing mentorship in leadership training and encouraging philanthropy among the alumni.

Dr. Leong’s research interests are broadly in the areas of computer networking and distributed systems. He has worked on a number of problems in the areas of sensor networks, network coding and peer-to-peer file transfers in the past. More recently, he is working on improving communications for mobile cellular networks, low-latency TCP and software defined networks. He received a number of Best Paper awards and was recepient of the 2009 ComSoc & Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award.

From July 2014 to Jun 2019, Dr. Leong served as the founding Director for the Experimental Systems & Technology Lab at the Singapore Ministry of Education. In this role, Dr. Leong set up the in-house software development capabilities for MOE and oversaw the developing of the Student Learning Space (SLS), the national learning management system currently in use at all MOE schools.

Prior to doing his PhD at MIT and joining NUS, Dr. Leong served as Assistant Director (Legal Service & Discipline) at the PSC Secretariat under the Public Service Division from 1999 to 2001. In that role, Dr. Leong managed the HR functions for the Singapore Legal Service and was in charge of disciplinary matters for the Singapore Civil Service.

Benjamin Ang

Chief Data Officer (Policy)

Benjamin Ang is the Chief Data Officer (Policy) at AI Singapore, where he oversees governance and policies around the utilisations of AISG’s data assets. He also leads implementation of cybersecurity and data privacy measures for AISG’s data assets.

He is concurrently a Senior Fellow and Deputy Head of the Center of Excellence for National Security (CENS), a policy research think tank in the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He leads the Cyber and Homeland Defence Programme (CHDP) of CENS, a team whose research areas include international cyber norms, cyber deterrence, cyber state governance, hybrid warfare and influence operations, cybercrime, smart city cybersecurity and governance, data privacy, national security issues in artificial intelligence, disinformation, foreign interference, hybrid threats, and strategic communications. The team includes researchers based in Singapore and adjuncts from the USA and Israel, who are drawn from multidisciplinary backgrounds of law, technology, communications, psychology, political science, marketing, law enforcement, and international relations.

Benjamin also serves on the Executive Committee of the Singapore Chapter of the Internet Society, the international non-profit organisation that is the trusted source of leadership on Internet policy, technology standards, and future development.