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 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.

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 and AI Apprenticeship programmes.

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)
Open Source Analytics 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.

Pro-bono appointments:

2020 – Ministry of National Development Scientific Panel Member

2020 – Global Partnership of AI (GPAI) Committee Member

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

2018 – Advisor, SGTECH AI+HPC Chapter

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

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

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.