2021 OCAA Winners
- Distinguished Alumni Service Awards
Class of 1990
Master of Business Administration
Bachelor of Science (with Honours) in Computer Science
Group Head of Information Security & Digital Risk Management, OCBC Group
Mr Thomas Kok Chun Hong graduated from NUS Faculty of Science’s Department of Information Systems and Computer Science (DISCS) in 1990 with a Bachelor of Science (with Honours) in Computer Science. Subsequently, he pursued a Master of Business Administration in NUS Business School, and graduated in 1997.
Thomas is currently the Group Head of Information Security & Digital Risk Management for the OCBC Group, where he chairs the bank’s Group Technology Risk Management Committee, and is responsible for driving group-wide governance, risk monitoring, assessment and mitigation initiatives relating to technology, information, and cyber risk.
Thomas has more than 30 years of experience in the IT industry and has served in regional and global leadership positions across Technology Risk Management, Business Continuity Management, and Information Technology Management in DBS Group, Credit Suisse AG, UOB Group and Citibank. In 2018, he was recognised by the industry organisation Institute of Banking & Finance (IBF) as IBF Fellow (Risk Management), and in 2022, he was awarded the ISACA Singapore Cyber Leaders Award (IT Risk Leader).
Thomas is highly committed to the development of the industry by participating in various committees and working groups. These include being the Vice Chair of ABS Standing Committee on Cyber Security (SCCS), and Chair of ABS Working Group on Revision of MAS Tech Risk Management Guidelines (PEGASUS). Previously, he has also served as organising committee chairperson of the ABS-MAS Financial Industry Crisis Communications Exercise (FICCE) 2016, organising committee member of the ABS-MAS Industry-wide Exercise (IWE) Raffles IV 2014, and member of ABS Business Resilience and Continuity Committee (BRC).
He often shares his insights at conferences and seminars, helping to elevate competencies of professionals across the industry. These include well-known conferences such as ISACA Singapore flagship annual conference GTACS and Institute of Banking & Finance (IBF) seminars on topics of cyber security and resilience, business continuity management, crisis management and technology risk management.
Class of 1996
Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
Research Scientist, Facebook AI
Dr Tan Wang-Chiew graduated from NUS Faculty of Science’s Department of Information Systems and Computer Science (DISCS) in 1996 with a Bachelor of Science (with Honours) in Computer Science. Subsequently, she pursued a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science from University of Pennsylvania, and graduated in 2002.
Wang-Chiew is a research scientist at Meta AI. Prior to joining Meta, she led the research efforts at Megagon Labs with the goal of building advanced technologies to enhance search by experience as the Head of Research. Her team conducted research on data integration, information extraction, text mining and summarization, knowledge base construction, common sense reasoning and data visualization. Previously, she was a Professor of Computer Science at University of California, Santa Cruz. She also spent two years at IBM Almaden Research Center.
Her research interests include data integration and exchange, data provenance, and natural language processing. She was the recipient of an NSF CAREER award, a Google Faculty Award, and an IBM Faculty Award. She co-authored best papers and received numerous recognition awards which includes being the co-recipient of the 2014 ACM PODS Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time Award, the 2018 ICDT Test-of-Time Award, and the 2020 Alonzo Church Award. She was the program committee chair of ICDT 2013, PODS 2016, and the program committee co-chair of SIGMOD 2020. She received the 2019 VLDB Women in Database Research Award. She was on the VLDB Board of Trustees (2014-2019) and she is a Fellow of the ACM.
- Outstanding Young Computing Alumni Award
Class of 2015
Bachelor of Computing, Information Systems
Senior Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services
Ms An Dongmei Annie graduated from NUS School of Computing in 2015 with a Bachelor of Computing (Information Systems).
Annie is currently a Senior Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS). In her job capacity, she helps enterprises across ASEAN to adopt and innovate with modern technology powered by cloud computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence. She believes technology is a key driver of innovation and an enabler for enterprises and the workforce of tomorrow. An active advocate of emerging technologies, Ms An is a trailblazer who innovates and sets new industry standards. She also serves the global community by actively participating in technology projects that dive deep into social issues.
Ms An is also a strong Diversity, Equity and Inclusion champion who empowers the next generation in IT. As a Women in Tech, and a part of IT Youth Council at the Singapore Computer Society and other voluntary organisations, Ms An has taught and mentored youths, and served on the judging panels at technology hackathons. A regular at Women in Tech panels, she has given talks and conducted tech workshops in Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore and China, and also inspired youths to create their own voice applications using emerging technology.
Class of 2015
Bachelor of Computing, Computer Science
Staff Engineer, Meta
Mr Yangshun Tay graduated from NUS School of Computing in 2015 with a Bachelor of Computing (Computer Science). While at NUS, he won the NUSS Medal for Outstanding Achievement (Best Graduate Throughout Course of Study with Outstanding All-round Achievements) and secured the NUS Kent Ridge Undergraduate Scholarship.
Yangshun is currently a Staff Engineer at Meta. He is an Engineering Lead on the Meta Store website which is the main direct-to-consumer channel of selling consumer hardware by Meta to the World. Prior to this role, he was a Software Engineer at Grab.
In the professional space, he has worked on many prominent projects which are widely adopted by various corporations. For instance, he conceived and led the development of Docusaurus v2 from 2018 to 2020, an open source project by Meta to achieve a quick and convenient way of building websites. Docusaurus is currently one of the most popular projects on GitHub by Meta with over 38k stars and is utilised by global companies such as Microsoft, LinkedIn, ByteDance, Snap, etc for their project documentation websites. Additionally, it is also used by SoC modules including CS3216 and CS3217 to build their module websites.
Today, Yangshun is still actively involved in NUS activities and has outstanding contributions to give back to the students. While he was a student, he served as an undergraduate tutor 8 times. Even after graduation, he has been helping out in an unofficial capacity as a team mentor, guest speaker and industry teaching assistant. He was also part of the NUSMods core team from 2013 to 2018 and developed v2 and v3 of NUSMods which is the official timetable planning tool for NUS students today. Currently, he is playing an advisory role to guide current maintainers and prospective students in building NUSMods v4 and pushing the boundaries of school collaboration software.
Yangshun is passionate about coaching students and empowering them to land their dream tech job. He is one of the most prominent contributors to the technical interviewing scene and has published 2 websites on acing technical interviews which provides free technical preparation materials for engineers. The websites are among the most popular resources for interviewing preparation, is one of the recommended technical preparation resources by Yale University and has benefited over a million developers worldwide.
Class of 2020
Master of Science, Business Analytics
Bachelor of Computing, Information Systems
Vice President, Data & Analytics Team, SGX
Ms Yi Suqin graduated from NUS School of Computing in 2009 with a Bachelor of Computing (Information Systems). Subsequently, she pursued Master of Science in Business Analytics in NUS Business School, and graduated in 2020.
Suqin is currently the Vice President of the Data & Analytics Team at Singapore Exchange Limited (SGX). She develops analytics to provide insights to business, automation, and operations. In her 13 years of illustrious career at SGX, she had led various teams to achieve business values and managed several high-profile projects. For instance, when she was with Derivatives Clearing Team, she had developed solutions to automate critical business processes, mitigate and resolve incidents. She was also responsible for the design and managed the joint development of a new bilateral trade registration system across two sites (in Singapore and Stockholm) that involves integration with more than ten other existing systems and industry wide testing.
In 2018, she embarked on a journey to pursue Master of Science in Business Analytics in NUS to take on the role of data scientist from IT solutions development. During her study, her team represented NUS to participate in the Chengdu FinTech80 design and development hackathon and emerged as champions. In winning the championship, she had beaten teams from other top global universities such as Peking University, Tsinghua University and University of California, Berkeley. Additionally, she was also the 2nd runner up in the 2019 Johnson & Johnson Analytics Innovation Challenge. Ms Yin is a perfect exemplar of a lifelong learner who had done NUS proud. Indeed, when she graduated with Masters in 2019, her capstone project was awarded the Outstanding Capstone Project Awards during the Business Analytics Technical Evening, which placed her within the top 5% of the graduating cohort.
Throughout the years, Suqin has been an active member of the NUS Computing Alumni Association and has supported numerous events organised by the NUS Students’ Computing Club such as the Career Week, mentoring for Orbital (Independent Software Development Project), and judging for Datathon (2020). She has also helped with the Code for Community programme (2017 to 2018), an initiative by NUS School of Computing to bring computing education to under privileged kids. As part of the programme, she along with fellow computing alumnus lead the students to participate in hackathons and went on to win 1st and 3rd place for Code Xtreme Apps hackathons (2018). In March 2021, she was also invited by the Business Analytics Centre to speak at its seminar series on “Data & Analytics at SGX”.
