2023 OCAA Winners
- Distinguished Computing Alumni Awards
Class of 1991
Bachelor of Science (DISCS 1991)
Group Chief Digital Strategy Officer, Chief Data Officer
Singapore Health Services Pte Ltd (SingHealth)
Mr Benedict Tan, Bachelor Science (DISCS 1991) is the Group Chief Digital Strategy Officer cum Chief Data Officer of Singapore Health Services Pte Ltd (SingHealth).
Benedict won the outstanding CIO in ASEAN award in 2014, Covid-19 Commendation Medal and Resilience Medal from the Prime Minister’s Office in 2022.
As an alumnus, Benedict has been and continues to be a strong supporter of School of Computing activities and student development programmes. His consistently led his team to render strong support in SoC student projects and organised orientation tours for SoC student interested in healthcare, for example.
Class of 2004
PhD in Computer Science
Boya Distinguished Professor and Vice Dean
Peking University
Prof Cui Bin, (Ph.D., CS 2004) is currently the Boya Distinguished Professor, Vice Dean of School of Computer Science, and Director of Institute of Data Science and Engineering of Peking University. Prof Cui received his Ph.D. from NUS School of Computing in 2004, joined Peking University as Associate Professor in 2006 before becoming a full professor in 2012.
Prof Cui has made significant contributions to the fields of database system, big data management and analytics, and ML/DL system. He has published 300 papers in top conferences and journals and won 7 Best Paper Awards.
In 2016, Prof Cui was named Distinguished Chang Jiang Professor which is the highest academic award by the Ministry of Education in China. Prof Cui was elected as the Secretary General and Vice Chair of TCDB China in 2016 and 2020 respectively. TCDB is the database committee in China with thousands of members.
Prof Cui was elected as a fellow of IEEE in 2023 for his contributions to large-scale data management, processing and analysis.
Class of 2008
PhD in Computer Science
OUB Chair Professor of Computer Science in Singapore Management University (SMU)
Prof David Lo, Ph.D. (CS 2008) is currently the OUB Chair Professor of Computer Science in Singapore Management University.
Prof Lo was elected ACM Fellow for his contributions to synergising artificial intelligence and software engineering for human-in-the-loop automation and software analytics in 2023, and was elected IEEE Fellow for his contributions to synergising software engineering and data mining in 2022.
Prof Lo continues to have fruitful research collaboration with many colleagues in SoC beyond his Ph.D. studies.
Class of 2010
PhD in Computer Science
Bachelor of Computing (First Class Honours) in Computer Science (2005)
President Chair Full Professor
Nanyang Technological University (NTU)
Prof Liu was an undergraduate student in SoC before continuing in SoC to earn his Ph.D. in CS in 2010. He is currently the President Chair Professor in Nanyang Technological University.
Prof Liu has established himself as a leading scholar in software engineering, cybersecurity and AI research with high quality publications and a plethora of awards.
He is leading the Cyber Security Research Centre at NTU and the CyberSG R&D Programme Office (CRPO). His leadership extends to several major research initiatives, including the Trustworthy AI in NTU (TAICeN) and the CREATE center in collaboration with ICL focusing on medical device security.
Prof. Liu’s research bridges the theoretical and practical aspects of program analysis, data analysis, and AI to critically evaluate the design and execution of secure, high-assurance software. His trailblazing research findings have found many success in the commercial world.
- Outstanding Young Computing Alumni Award
Class of 2021
Master of Computing
Bachelor of Computing (First Class Honours) in Information Systems (2015)
VP Incident Response, Citi
Mr. Wee (Yap Hwee) earned his Bachelor of Computing (2015) and Master of Computing (2021) from the NUS School of Computing (SoC) faculty.
He has made notable contributions in his academic, professional and community pursuits. Mr. Wee is currently contributing to the cybersecurity field, specializing in Cyber Threat Intelligence, Incident Response, and Privileged Access Management, where he has helped protect local and global financial institutions.
Since his graduation in 2015, Mr. Wee has been a dedicated alumnus ambassador, actively participating in the University Open Day annually, and speaking at alumni events for incoming SoC students. He joined the NUS Orbital Programme in 2018 as an industry mentor providing guidance and support for student teams.
Beyond his contributions to NUS and SoC, Mr. Wee is an active volunteer with Engineering Good, a charity organization that restores computing devices to enhance digital inclusion, empower and broaden technology access for in-need communities while promoting environmental sustainability.
Class of 2010
Bachelor of Computing (Turing Programme)
Senior Staff Research Scientist
Google DeepMind
Dr Luong graduated with a Bachelor of Computing (Turing Programme) in 2010 before earning his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2016. He pioneered the field of deep learning for machine translation in his Ph.D. work.
He is currently a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind where he built state-of-the-art models in both language (ELECTRA) and vision (NoisyStudent). He co-founded Project Meena which debuted the world’s best chatbot in 2020 and later became Google LaMDA chatbot in 2021.
Dr Luong has been co-leading the development of Bard Multimodality since 2022 and is the PI of the AlphaGeometry project, published at Nature in 2024, that built an Olympiad-level AI system for geometry. Dr Luong is also a co-founder of VietAI, a non-profit organization that nurtures a community of world-class AI experts in Vietnam.
