20 October 2021 – Provost’s Chair Professor Atreyi Kankanhalli has made this year’s Singapore 100 Women in Tech (SG100WIT) List, which honours women who have made trailblazing contributions to the field of technology in Singapore.
Organised by the Singapore Computer Society in partnership with the Infocomm Media Development Authority, the SG100WIT List is part of the SG Women in Tech movement that brings together industry, government, and community partners to develop and nurture female talent for the Singapore’s rising tech sector, and reaffirms the importance of having a diverse workforce.
Prof Kankanhalli was recognised as being one of the top 100 information systems researchers worldwide, having contributed significantly to the discipline in Singapore, and across the world.
She has developed innovations that are patented and used worldwide, in organisations such as the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore, as well as Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft. These include a container number recognition system that automatically recognises and verifies container numbers on trucks as they pass through the port terminal gates, as well as a video segmentation algorithm that identifies boundaries between video segments/shots.
Prof Kankanhalli has also worked closely with small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to support their digital transformation journeys, and received the Kauffman Award for her published work on digitalisation of SMEs.
She has also examined the use of mobile apps in delivering health interventions, and collaborated with a number of Singapore hospitals to evaluate systems for web-based messaging, vital signs monitoring, and electronic healthcare records.
As a woman in the industry, Prof Kankanhalli says that this award is especially meaningful for her, as she strongly believes in encouraging women to pursue technology careers.
She has the following advice for women looking to pursue a career in tech: “There are several things that worked for me — be persistent, be curious and aim to master your area, excel and impress with your work, don’t be shy to ask for opportunities and advice. You may face bias/challenges for sure, but that should, hopefully, make you more determined to succeed!”
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The 2021 SG100WIT List also includes NUS Computing alumnae such as Ms Tan Shui-Min, Chief Information Technology Officer at NUS, Dr Sharmili Roy, Data Science Senior Lead at Tokopedia, and Dr Ong Chen Hui, Cluster Director of the Biztech Group at the Infocomm Media Development Authority, and Chairman of SG Women in Tech.
Check out the full list of NUS staff, students, and alumni in the 2021 SG100WIT List.
