2022 OCAA Winners
- Distinguished Computing Alumni Awards
Class of 2009
Bachelor of Computing in Information Systems
Co-Founder & Chief Marketing Officer, PatSnap
Ms Guan Dian, who graduated from NUS Computing with a Bachelor of Computing (Information Systems) degree in 2009, is the co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of PatSnap, an intellectual property intelligence firm founded in 2007. She was also instrumental in propelling PatSnap to unicorn status in 2021.
PatSnap is a market leading provider of intellectual property analytics, analysing technology trends, accelerating innovation, market planning, competitor intelligence and maximising returns on existing and new IP assets. Used by over 3,000 organisations globally including NASA, GE, Lego, Vodafone, Ferrari, Siemens, Xiaomi and China Mobile, PatSnap has secured the support of venture capital firms such as Sequoia, Summit Partners, Shunwei and Vertex Ventures.
Guan was formerly an analyst at Credit Suisse First Boston and a software engineer at MooWee, San Francisco, which provides video application solutions. Among the many recognition titles and awards Guan received are Forbes Asia’s 30 Under 30 list (2016), Tatler Gen.T (Singapore) (2018), NUS Outstanding Young Alumni Award (2019) and Tatler Asia’s Most Influential (2021)
Class of 2005
Bachelor of Computing in Information Systems
Co-Founder, Circles Life
Mr Rameez Ansar graduated from NUS Computing in 2005 and is currently one of the Co-Founders of Circles. Circles is a global technology company that helps operators launch, transform and operate digital telcos (neo telcos) at scale with its proprietary full stack SaaS platform, Circles X and digital go to market. Circles was born and bred in Singapore and now operates in 16 countries across 6 continents. In Singapore, it operates Circles.Life as Singapore’s top digital telco brand.
Upon graduation, Rameez worked for the corporate finance and M&A practice of the global management consulting firm, Boston Consulting Group (BCG). At BCG, he contributed to the setting up of the regulatory framework and corporatisation of Changi Airport. In 2008, he joined Temasek Holdings as Associate Director managing portfolio and new investments. He was also a founding member of the strategy, portfolio and risk committee that reviewed capital allocation, investment strategy and macroeconomic implications..
After his stint at Temasek Holdings, Rameez co-founded TechCube8 and managed a technology, media and telecoms focused venture fund that received co-investment from the National Research Foundation. With this fund, he assisted in mentoring over a dozen entrepreneurs and supporting start-ups incubated at Singapore’s Block 71 start-up ecosystem.
Outside of work, Rameez has helped raise one of the first named alumni bursary funds at NUS and has mentored dozens of polytechnic students as part of the Harvard’s Business School mentorship program.
- Outstanding Young Computing Alumni Award
Class of 2016
Bachelor of Computing in Information Systems
Deputy Director (Information Services), Housing & Development Board (HDB)
Mr Lee Chen Tong graduated with a Bachelor of Computing (Information Systems) from NUS Computing in 2015 and went on to earn a Master of Philosophy in Management at the University of Cambridge.
Chen Tong has been working at the Housing & Development Board (HDB) for more than seven years in various positions. Inspired by his father who started his career at HDB, Chen Tong took up the HDB Undergraduate Scholarship and eventually started his own career journey in HDB as a Systems Analyst in the Geospatial Information Systems & 3D Team. Responsible for designing geospatial systems and pushing the boundaries on immersive technology use cases across HDB, Chen Tong went on to pioneer the use of Virtual Reality (VR) in the co-designing of community spaces with residents under the Remaking Our Heartland programme – an initiative that was featured in mainstream media including The Straits Times, Lianhe Zaobao and Channel NewsAsia. He was concurrently tasked to lead HDB’s board-wide digital transformation effort through the inception of its Digital Master Plan, and the subsequent coordination of business process reengineering work streams across all the business group heads in HDB.
Being recognised for his performance and potential early on, Chen Tong was quickly given the opportunity to lead his team 2 years into his role, and was subsequently rotated to lead the Carparks Systems Team before being later appointed Deputy Director (Application Engineering) 4.5 years into his career at HDB. As Deputy Director (Application Engineering), Chen Tong established and helmed the organisation’s in-house cloud engineering capabilities, growing the pioneer team of Software Engineers into a multi-team outfit that leverages cloud and modern software engineering paradigms to achieve faster time-to-value for HDB’s business groups.
Having laid the foundations for HDB’s cloud engineering capabilities, Chen Tong has recently been appointed Deputy Director (Information Services) to head the organisation’s Cloud Centre of Excellence. In this new capacity, Chen Tong takes on the responsibility for establishing and driving organisational alignment to HDB’s cloud migration strategy, as well as propagating cloud engineering solution patterns across all Product Teams as the organisation scales its cloud endeavour.
Class of 2014
Doctor in Philosophy in Computer Science
Faculty Member, Max Planck Institute of Security and Privacy
Dr Marcel Böhme graduated with a Doctor of Philosophy (Computer Science) from NUS Computing in 2014. He was a Senior Research Fellow at NUS for almost three years. Marcel completed his undergraduate studies at Technische Universität Dresden.
Marcel currently leads the Software Security research group at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP) in Bochum, Germany. Previously, he was an ARC DECRA Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Monash University in Australia. Before that, he was a PostDoc at the TSUNAMi Security Research Centre in Singapore and the CISPA-Helmholtz Zentrum in Germany.
His current research interest is the automatic discovery of security flaws on a very large scale. One part of his group develops the probabilistic foundations of automatic software testing (i.e., finding bugs by generating executions) to elucidate fundamental limitations of existing techniques and to explore the assurances that software testing provides when no bugs are found.
Marcel’s other part of the group develops practical vulnerability discovery tools that are widely used in software security practice. For instance, Entropic is the default power schedule in LibFuzzer which powers the largest fuzzing platforms at Google and Microsoft, fuzzing hundreds of security-critical projects on 100k machines on a 24-hour basis. His tools have discovered 100+ bugs in widely used software systems, more than 70 of which are security-critical vulnerabilities registered as CVEs at the US National Vulnerability Database.
