See-Kiong Ng (Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University), a recipient of the Singapore National Computer Board's overseas scholarship (1986), is currently Professor of Practice at the Department of Computer Science of the School of Computing, National University of Singapore (NUS), and Director, Translational Research for the university's Institute of Data Science. Founded in May 2016, the Institute is the focal point at NUS for developing integrated data science capabilities and nurturing data scientists for Singapore's Smart Nation initiative. It pushes the boundary of data science through transdisciplinary upstream research, and creates impact by translating the research outcomes into real-life applications by collaborating with partners from the industry and public agencies.

Prior to joining NUS, See-Kiong was the Programme Director of the Urban Systems Initiative by the Science and Engineering Research Council of the Agency of Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR). The Initiative was a pioneering research program that developed technologies and innovations for smart cities to address the many new challenges of the rapidly urbanising world. See-Kiong was also a Principal Scientist and the founding head of the Data Analytics Department at A*STAR's Institute for Infocomm Research. The department rapidly became a prominent leader of applied data mining research, with possibly the largest number of data scientists locally, and successful research collaborations with industry from a wide array of verticals.

See-Kiong's diverse and cross-disciplinary research interests — Bioinformatics, Smart Cities, Text Mining, Social Network Mining, and Privacy-Preserving Data Mining — revolve around advancing the science of data. His primary research objective is to unravel the underlying functional mechanisms of dynamic real-world networks and complex systems through the practice of data science.

As a practising data scientist, See-Kiong is constantly in search of big data and never afraid to cross over into other disciplines for it. From using data mining to unravel the biology of the human body (bioinformatics), to applying machine learning to understand the "biology" of large-scale urban systems for complex human cities (smart cities), See-Kiong has shown that there are always much values in data to be created and harvested through data science, translational research, and a spirit of adventure. [More on my background here.]