research statement | awards | national committees | international committees | editorial boards | PC chair and steering committees | program committees | journal reviewing | invited talks | consultancy and adjunct appointments

RESEARCH STATEMENT

My interest in research is to develop intelligent techniques to help us obtain better insights and understanding of the world through computation on data.

• I am interested in using computation to understand human languages, human biology, human societies, and human cities better. As a practitioner of data mining and machine learning, I have worked on Natural Language Processing, Text Mining, Bioinformatics, Social Network Analysis, and Privacy-preserving techniques.
  
  
• My early industry experience has molded me into a pragmatist who prefers research as an instrument or tool for prediction, action, and problem solving. The overseas industry exposure (2 start-up's and one multi-national-corporation) has instilled in me a passion for insights into the true requirements of the real world, and a perspective for understanding what problems most need to be solved. As a result, I continue to adopt a use-driven and cross-disciplinary research philosophy throughout my research career, and I leave the more fundamental research to my graduate students and professorial collaborators at the universities.


• As a researcher who is constantly seeking new challenges to sharpen one's research techniques, I make it a point to reinvent myself every ten or so years to take on research problems in new emerging domains that are multifaceted and require in-depth, cross-disciplinary knowledge to obtain solutions. In the first decade of my research career (1989-1999), I have looked into the challenge of understanding human languages by mining unstructured text for information extraction and knowledge discovery. In the second decade (2000-2010), I studied the problem of unraveling the complexities of human biology by mining biomedical data and understanding the biological interaction networks using computational techniques. Now that I am into my third decade of my research career, and I am working on computational research in urban systems, using data mining and machine learning to unravel the "biology" of cities to address the new challenges of the rapidly urbanizing world.

AWARDS

• Minister for National Development's R&D Awards 2017 (Distinguished Award), for innovation in developing a city-level integrated analytics platform to enable a more effective and efficient data-driven planning process across the whole of government, 29 June 2017.


• MTI (Ministry of Trade and Industry Singapore) Borderless Award, as project member of the Green Growth Working Group (G3) to advance national efforts in green growth initiatives and narrative, 17 June 2014.


• A*STAR (Agency for Science, Technology and Research Singapore) Borderless Award, as team leader of the Urban Systems Initiative, 9th April 2014.


• MTI (Ministry of Trade and Industry Singapore) Innovation Award, in recognition of the winning project on Strategic Technology Translation in Business Analytics, 3 May 2013.


• Winner, PAKDD 2012 (The 16th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining) Data Mining Competition Open Category, Problem 1: Predicting potential churners and ex-customers who are likely to come back, May 29-June 1, 2012.


• Best Paper Runner-Up Award, The 16th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA 2011) "ECODE: Event-Based Community Detection from Social Networks", April 22-25, 2011.


• Best Poster Award, The 12th Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB 2008) "Mining for Domain Dependency Sets from Protein Interactions ", March 30 - April 2, 2008.


• Best Paper Award, The 16th International Conference on Genome Informatics (GIW 2005) "Interaction Graph Mining for Protein Complexes Using Local Clique Merging", December 19-21, 2005.

NATIONAL COMMITTEES

• Member of AI Singapore’s Grand Challenge Program Committee in Urban Solutions (2017)


• Member, IT and Digital Advisory Panel (ITDAP), National Gallery Singapore (2016)
  
  
• Member, Academic and Industry Group (AIG) of Enabling ICT and Platforms Workgroup for National Innovation Challenge on Land and Liveability (2013-2016)
  
  
• Member, Mid-Term Review Panel, Singapore-ETH Centre - Future Cities Laboratory, Singappore (2013)
  
  
• Expert panel member, National Research Foundation Technology Foresight on Urban Solutions (2013)
  
  
• Member of the A*STAR's Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) Public Sector Funding Technical Review Panel (PSF-TRP) (2013-present)


• Co-chairperson of Technical Review Panel for A*STAR's Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) Thematic Programmes under Infocomm, Media and Computing Cluster (2014-2016)


• Technical Reviewer for the Land and Liveability National Innovation Challenge (L2 NIC) R&D Proposals (2014-2017)

INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEES

• Member, International Assessment Panel for New Zealand Data Science Research Programmes, Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment (MBIE), New Zealand (2018-2019)
  


• Member, Committee on A Global Review of Data-to-Decisions Technologies: Integrating Humans, Machines and Networks, Board of Global Science and Technology, National Academy of Sciences, USA (2012-2013)
  

EDITORIAL BOARDS

• Associate Editor, "Advances in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology" (ABCB) book series, Imperial College Press, London, 2004-present.
• Editorial Board Member, International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics (IJDMB), Inderscience Publishers, 2006-2013.
  
• Co-Editor-in-Chief, International Journal of Knowledge Discovery in Bioinformatics (IJKDB), IGI Publishing, 2010-2013.
  

PC CHAIRS AND STEERING COMMITTEES

• PAKDD-2020: General Co-chair, The 24th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
• ICDM-2010 to 2013: PC Co-chair, 1st to 4th Workshops on Biological Data Mining and its Applications in Healthcare:
• GIW-2008: PC Co-chair, 19th International Conference on Genome Informatics
• GIW-2007: PC Co-chair, 18th International Conference on Genome Informatics

PROGRAM COMMITTEES

• IJCAI-2021 (Senior PC member): The 30th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, August 21-26, 2021, Montreal, Canada.
• AAAI-2021: The 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, February 2-9, 2021, Virtual Conference.
• KDD-2020 (Senior PC member, Applied Data Science Track): The 26th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, August 23 - 27, 2020, Virtual Conference.
• AAAI-2020: The 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, February 7-12, 2020, New York, USA.
• IJCAI-2019 (Senior PC member): The 28th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, August 10-16, 2019, Macao, China .
• KDD-2019 (Senior PC member, Applied Data Science Track): The 25th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, August 3 - 7, 2019, Anchorage, Alaska, USA.
• AAAI-2019: The 33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, January 27 - Feb 1, 2019, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA.
• KDD-2018 (Applied Data Science Track): The 24th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, August 19-23, 2018, London, United Kingdom.
• AAAI-2018: The 32nd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, February 2-7, 2018, New Orleans, Lousiana, USA.
• IJCAI-2017 (Senior PC member): The 26th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, August 19-25, 2017, Melbourne, Australia .
• KDD-2017 (Applied Data Science Track): The 23rd ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, August 13-17, 2017, Halifax, Nova Scotia - Canada.
• ICDM-2016: The 16th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, December 12-15, 2016, Barcelona, Spain.
• KDD-2016: ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, August 13-17, 2016, San Francisco, USA.
• ICDM-2015: The 15th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, November 14-17, 2015, Atlantic City, NJ, USA.
• SMC-2015: IEEE Internatioal Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, October 9-12, 2015, Hong Kong.
• KDD-2015: ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, August 10-13, 2015, Sydney, Australia.
• PAKDD-2015: The 19th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, May 19-22, 2015, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
• ICDM-2014: The 14th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, December 14-17, 2014, Shenzhen, China.
• DARE-2014: ECML / PKDD Workshop on Data Analytics for Renewable Energy Integration, September, 2014, Nancy, France.
• KDD-2014: ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, August 24-27, 2014, New York, USA.
• PAKDD-2014: The 18th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, May 13-16, 2014, Tainan, Taiwan.
• ICDM-2013: The 13th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, December 8-11, 2013, Texas, USA.
• SocInfo-2013: The 5th International Conference on Social Informatics, November 25-27, 2013, Kyoto, Japan.
• ICTAI-2013: The 25th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence, November 4-6, 2013, Washington DC, USA.
• DARE-2013: ECML / PKDD Workshop on Data Analytics for Renewable Energy Integration, September 27, 2013, Prague, Czech Republic.
• KDD-2013: The 19th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, August 11-14, 2013, Chicago, USA.
• PAKDD-2013: The 17th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, April 14-17, 2013, Gold Coast, Australia.
• ICMLA-2012: The 11th International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications, December 12-15, 2012, Florida, USA.
• SocInfo-2012: The 4th International Conference on Social Informatics, December 5-7, 2012, Lausanne, Switzerland.
• ICTAI-2012: The 24th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence, November 7-9, 2012, Athens, Greece.
• ACML-2012: The 4th Asian Conference on Machine Learning, November 4-6, 2012, Singapore.
• FFDM-2012: The 2012 International Symposium on Foundations and Frontiers of Data Mining, August 11-13, 2012, Hangzhou, China.
• PAKDD-2012: The 16th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, May 29-June 1, 2012, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
• ICMLA-2011: The 10th IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications, December 18-21, 2011, Honolulu, USA.
• LBM-2011: The 4th International Symposium on Languages in Biology and Medicine, December 14-15, 2011, Singapore.
• ICDM-2011: The 11th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, December 11-14, 2011, Vancouver, Canada.
• ACML-2011: The 3rd Asian Conference on Machine Learning, November 13-15, 2011, Taoyuan, Taiwan.
• BIBM-2011: IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics & Biomedicine, November 12-15, 2011, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
• ICTAI-2011: The 23rd IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence, November 7-9, 2011, Boca Raton, Florida, USA.
• BIBE-2011: 11th IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Bioengineering, October 24-26, 2011, Taichung, Taiwan.
• SocInfo-2011: The 3rd International Conference on Social Informatics, October 6-8, 2011, Singapore.
• GrC-2011: IEEE International Conference on Granular Computing, August 11-13, 2011, Sapporo, Japan.
• ISMB/ECCB-2011: The 19th Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology and 10th European Conference on Computational Biology, July 17-19, 2011, Vienna, Italy.
• HISB-2011: First IEEE Conference on Healthcare Informatics, Imaging, and Systems Biology , February 6-8, 2011, San Jose, California.
• BIBM-2010: IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics & Biomedicine, December 18-21, 2010, Hong Kong.
• DMBD-2010: International Workshop on Data Mining for Biomarker Discovery, December 18-21, 2010, Hong Kong
• GIW-2010: The 21st International Conference on Genome Information, December 16-18, 2010, Hangzhou, China.
• ICDM-2010: The 10th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, December 13-17, 2010, Sydney, Australia.
• ACML-2010: The 2nd Asian Conference on Machine Learning, November 8-10, 2010, Tokyo, Japan.
• SMBM-2010: The 4th Symposium on Semantic Mining in Biomedicine, Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, UK, October 25-26 2010.
• ITBAM-2010: The 1st International Conference on Information Technology in Bio- and Medical Informatics, August 30-September 3, 2010, Bilbao, Spain.
• DILS-2010: 7th International Conference on Data Integration in the Life Sciences, August 25-27, 2010, Gothenburg, Sweden.
• GrC-2010: IEEE International Conference on Granular Computing, August 14-16, 2010, Silicon Valley, California, USA.
• ISMB-2010: The 18th International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology, July 11-13, 2010, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
• IBW-2010: The 8th International Bioinformatics Workshop, June 4-6, 2010, Wuhan, China.
• EvoBIO-2010: 8th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation, Machine Learning and Data Mining in Bioinformatics, April 7-9, 2010, Istanbul, Turkey.
• BICoB-2010: 2nd International Conference on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, March 24-26, 2010, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA.
• Sixth International Symposium on Integrative Bioinformatics, March 22-24, 2010, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
• GIW-2009: The 20th International Conference on Genome Informatics, December 14-16, 2009, Yokohama, Japan.
• ICMLA-2009: The 8th International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications, December 13-15, 2009, Miami, USA.
• 1st International Workshop on Social Networks Interoperability, at the 4th Asian Semantic Web Conference, December 6-9, 2009, Shanghai, SChina.
• LBM2009: Symposium on Languages in Biology and Medicine, Novemebr 12-13, 2009, Jeju Island, South Korea.
• CNIKM'09:ACM CIKM-2009 Workshop - Complex Networks meet Information & Knowledge Management, November 6, 2009, Hong Kong.
• ACML-2009: The 1st Asian Conference on Machine Learning, November 2-4, 2009, Nanjing, China.
• DMBD 2009: International Workshop on Data Mining for Biomarker Discovery, Nov 1-4, 2009, Washington D.C., USA.
• BIBM 2009: IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics & Biomedicine Nov 1-4, 2009, Washington D.C., USA.
• DILS 2009: The 6th International Workshop on Data Integration in the Life Sciences, July 20-22, 2009, Manchester, United Kingdom.
• ISMB/ECCB-2009: The 17th Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology and 8th European Conference on Computational Biology, June 27-July 2, 2009, Stockholm, Sweden.
• EvoBIO-2009: 7th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation, Machine Learning and Data Mining in Bioinformatics, April 15-17, 2009, Tübingen, Germany.
• ICMLA-2008: The 7th International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications, December 11-13, 2008, San Diego, USA.
• BIBM-2008: IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine, November 7-9, 2008, Philadelphia, USA.
• PRIB-2008: Third IAPR International Workshop on Pattern Recognition in Bioinformatics, October 15-17, 2008, Melbourne, Australia.
• ECCB-2008:European Conference on Computational Biology, September 22-26, 2008, Cagliari, Sardinia-Italy.
• SMBM-2008:Third International Symposium on Semantic Mining in Biomedicine, September 1-3, 2008, Turku, Finland.
• Fifth International Symposium on Integrative Bioinformatics, August 20-22, 2008, Leucorea Wittenberg, Germany.
• BIRD-2008: Second International Conference on Bioinformatics Research and Development, July 7-9, 2008, Vienna, Germany
• AWIC-2008: Sixth Atlantic Web Intelligence Conference, June 30-July 03, 2008, Cape Town, South Africa
• EvoBIO-2008: 6th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation, Machine Learning and Data Mining in Bioinformatics, March 26-28, 2008, Napoli, Italy.
• GrC 2007 : IEEE International Conference on Granular Computing, California, USA, November 2-4, 2007
• BIBE-2007: IEEE 7th International Symposium on BioInformatics and BioEngineering, October 14-17, 2007, USA.
• FBIT-2007: Frontiers in the Convergence of Bioscience and Information technologies, October 11-13, 2007, Korea.
• PRIB-2007: Second IAPR International Workshop on Pattern Recognition in Bioinformatics, October 1-2, 2007, Singapore.
• ISMB/ECCB-2007: 15th Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology & 6th European Coneference on Computational Biology, July 21-25, 2007, Austria.
• BIRD-2007: First International Conference on Bioinformatics Research and Development, April 2007, Berlin, Germany.
• ESCAPE-2007: First International Symposium on Combinatorics, Algorithms, Probabilistic and Experimental Methodologies, April 2007, Hangzhou, China.
• GIW-2006 : 17th International Conference on Genome Informatics, Yokohama, December, 2006.
• PKDD06: Data and Text Mining for Integrative Biology Workshop, in the 10th European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, Berlin, 18-22 September 2006.
• ISMB06 : 14th Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology, Fortaleza, Brazil, August 6-10 2006.
• ICCSB2006 : First International Conference on Computational Systems Biology, Shanghai, China, July 20-23, 2006.
• RECOMB (satellite) : 3rd RECOMB Satellite Conference on Regulatory Genomics Singapore, July 17-18, 2006.
• Workshop on BioAlgorithmics (Local Organizing Committee), Institute of Mathematical Science, NUS, Singapore, 12-14 July, 2006.
• SCBB06 : Symposium of Computations in Bioinformatics and Bioscience (SCBB06), HangZhou, China, June 22-26 2006.
• GrC 2006 : IEEE International Conference on Granular Computing, Atlanta, USA, May 10-12, 2006
• PAKDD 2006 - KDLL : Workshop on Knowledge Discovery in Life Science Literature, in 10th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Singapore, 9-12 April 2006.
• PAKDD 2006 - BioDM : Workshop on Data Mining for Biomedical Applications, in 10th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Singapore, 9-12 April 2006.
• GIW-2005 : 16th International Conference on Genome Informatics, Yokohama, December 19-21, 2005.
• LBM2005: First International Symposium on Languages in Biology and Medicine, Novemebr 24-26, 2005.
• BIOINFO2005 : Joint conference for INCOB2005, AASBi2005 and KSBi2005 in Busan, South Korea, September 22-24, 2005. Regional Chair.
• SMBM 2005 : 1st International Symposium on Semantic Mining in Biomedicine, European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Hinxton, Cambridge, UK, April 10-13, 2005.
• ICCSA 2005 - DMBIO : 1st International Workshop on Data Mining and Bioinformatics (in conjunction with the 2005 International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications), Singapore, May 9-12, 2005.
• APBC 2005 : 3rd Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Conference, Singapore, 17-21 January, 2005.
• GIW 2004 : 15th International Conference on Genome Informatics, Yokohama, Japan, December 13-15, 2004.
• BioLINK 2004 : BioLINK Workshop, HLT/NAACL 2004, Boston, USA, May 6, 2004.
• IJCNLP-2004 : Text Mining in Biomedicine Thematic Session, 1st International Joint Conference of Natural Language Processing, Hainan, China, March 22-24, 2004.
• ISMB 2003 : Text Mining and Protein Interactions, ISMB2003.

JOURNAL REVIEWING

• Bioinformatics journal (2003-present)
• BMC Journal of Bioinformatics (2003-present)
• BMC Journal of Microbiology (2005)
• BMC Journal of Genomics (2006, 2008)
• Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine (2007-present)
• Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (JCBC) (2003-present)
• IEEE Intelligent Systems (2005)
• ACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing - Special Issue on Text Mining and Management in Biomedicine (2005)
• IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering - Special Issue on Mining Biological Data (2004)
• Journal of Biomedical Informatics (2004, Special Issue on Natural Language Processing in Biomedicine: Aims, Achievements and Challenges)
• IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I (TCAS-I) (2006)
• In Silico Biology (ISB) (2006)
• Journal of Biomolecular Structure & Dynamics (2006)
  
• IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (TCBB) (2007)
  

INVITED TALKS

• "Can AI rescue us from diseases and pandemics?", invited lecture, International Joint Usage/Research Center-Young Researchers Symposium, Institute of Medical Science, University of Tokyo, Japan, 26 March 2021.
• "JARVIS_DHL: AI for Transforming Chronic Care", invited talk, SingHealth-DukeNUS’s Family Medicine Academic Clinical Programme (FM ACP) Research Grand Round, Singapore, 18 March 2021.
• "Data Sharing as a Virtue", invited talk, Singapore Stage, World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), Shanghai, China, 10 July 2020.
• "从数据到AI", invited talk, 企业与人工智能讲座系列, Singapore, 1 September 2019 [poster][report].
• "Time Series Anomaly Detection using Deep Learning", invited talk, 19th Annual International Workshop on Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, Kyoto, Japan, July 14-17 2019.
• "The Future of AI?", invited talk, STEE InnoTech Conference, Singapore, 25 April 2019.
• "Harnessing Unstructured Medical Data", invited talk, Inaugural Symposium on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, organized by SingHealth and NUS, Singapore, 4 April 2018.
• "Learning to Live in a Data-Driven World", invited talk, Workshop on Digital Transformation in Urban Society organized by the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities, Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) and Sol Price School of Public Policy, University of Southern California (USC), Singapore, 16-17 March 2018.
• "Navigating the Age of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence", invited talk, DSTA Academy Technology Talks, Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA), Singapore, 18 May 2017.
• "The Science of Data + X", invited talk, A*STAR Scientific Symposium, Singapore, 2 August 2016.
• "Making Cities Smarter with Big Data", invited talk, First Urban Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) Executive Bureau Forum, Kazan, Russia, 26-28 May 2016.
• "Harnessing Big Data to Make Cities Smart", invited keynote, AI Forum 2016, Hualian, ROC, 29-30 April 2016.
• "Addressing the New Challenges of the Rapidly Urbanizing World with Big Data", invited talk, 2nd Asia-Pacific Conference on Complex Systems Design & Management, Singapore, 24-26 February 2016.
• "Harnessing Big Data and data analytics to improve the lifves of citizens in smart cities", invited talk, TM Forum Smart City InFocus 2015, Yinchuan, People's Republic of China, 11-13 September 2015.
• "Smart Cities and Big Data: Opportunities and Challenges", keynote, 13th International Conference on Smart Homes and Health Telematics "Inclusive Smart Cities and e-Health" (ICOST 2015), Geneva, Switzerland, 10-12 June 2015.
• "Unravelling Big Data for Smart Cities", invited talk, International Smart Cities Initiative (SCI2015) Workshop, held in conjunction with Information and Communication Technology Research Forum (ICTRF2015), Abu Dhabi, UAE, 18 May 2015.
• "Smart Cities and Big Data: Opportunities and Challenges", invited talk, Information and Communication Technology Research Forum (ICTRF2015), Abu Dhabi, UAE, 17 May 2015.
• "Transforming Singapore into a Smart Nation", invited talk, International Forum on Smart National Territory Development Strategies 2015, Taipei, ROC, 11-13 May 2015.
• "Data Analytics for Smart Future Cities", invited talk, Ovum's 4th Annual Urban IoT / Smart to Future Cities 2015, London, United Kingdom, 28-29 April 2015.
• "Realizing Data Economy for Smart Nation", invited talk, First Roundtable of Thought Leaders on Innovation in Cities, Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities, Singapore, 19-20 January 2015.
• "Addressing the New Challenges of the Rapidly Urbanizing World through Technology and Innovations", invited talk, Future Cities Asia, Hong Kong, 14-16 October 2014.
• "Addressing the New Challenges of the Rapidly Urbanizing World through Technology and Innovations", Opening Address (Day 2), Safe Cities Asia, Singapore, 27-30 May 2014.
• "Be Actionable-Ready: From Big Data to Smart Data", invited talk, NCS TechConnect, Singapore, 23 May 2014.
• "Big Data in the City: A Game-Changer for Building Better Cities", invited talk, First EMTech Singapore, 20-21 January, 2014.
• "From Bright Lights, Big Cities to Smart Cities, Big Data", invited talk, First DEXTRA Workshop, 1 August 2013.
• "Smart Cities, Big Data - Urban Systems Initiative", invited talk, Urban Sustanability R&D Congress, Singapore, 27-28 June 2013.
• "Advanced Interdisciplinary Research towards Innovation - From understanding the biology of human body to unraveling the biology of human cities", invited talk, 1st e-ASIA JRP Symposium, Singapore, 04 December 2012.
• "Unravelling Big Data: Empowering Your Business with Analytics", invited panelist, Singtel's i.luminate Business Innovations Forum, Singapore, 06 Nov 2012.
• "Making better decisions improves productivity - analytics is the key", invited panelist, 18th IT Best Practices (ITBP) Seminar, Singapore, 30th October 2012.
• "Urban Systems Analytics: The Way We (will) Live", invited talk, 19th Infocomm Media Horizons, Fusionopolis, Singapore, 15-16 August 2012.
• "Urban Systems Initiatives: Urban Solutions for Tomorrow's Smart Cities Today", invited talk, Smart City Workshop 2012 Singapore, Hitachi Asia R&D, 3 August 2012.
• "Unleash the Power of Information: From Open Science to Open Governments", invited talk, Web Science and Open Data Workshop, A*STAR and University of Southampton, 12 March 2012.
• "Mining for Knowledge: From Biological to Medical Data", invited talk, International Symposium on Infocomm & Media Technology in Bio-Medical & Healthcare Applications (3T-in-3A), Chiba University, Japan, 21 February, 2012.
• "Data Mining for Supply Chain Analytics", invited talk, Infocomm Professional Development Forum, NInfocomm Development Authority (IDA) and Singapore Computer Society (SCS), 7 July 2011.
• "Knowledge Discovery through Biological and Medical Data Mining", invited talkand panelist, BioComplexity Workshop: System Biology Approach to Systems Drug Discovery and Systems Medicine, National University of Singapore, 14-15 February 2011.
• "The Alchemy of Data: Using Data Mining and Semantics to turn raw data into gold", invited talk and panelist, Whole-of-Government Data Management Forum, Ministry of Finance and the Infocomm Development Authority, 7 January 2011.
• "Intelligent Geospatial Data Mining", invited talk, Geospatial Information and Technology Exchange Forum (GITEX), Singapore Land Authority, 30 April 2010.
• "Medical Applications of Data Mining ", invited talk, Chiba University, Japan, 30 March 2010.
• "Searching for Rising Stars in Researchers' Collaboration Networks", invited talk, Seoul National University, Korea, 13 November 2009.
• "Searching for Rising Stars in Bibliography Networks", invited research presentation for the Workshop on Mining User-Generated Content, Singapore Management University, 8 August 2009.
• "Unraveling the Building Blocks of Protein-Protein Interaction Networks", invited seminar, Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University, Japan, 20 April 2009.
• "Deciphering Protein-Protein Interactions - Experimentally and Computationally", invited guest lecture, School of Biological Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 10 September 2008.
• "Network Data Mining", invited lecture for A Short Course on Introduction to Data Mining, organized by the Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence Association (PREMIA), School of Computer Science, National University of Singapore, Singapore, 28 June 2008.
• "Data Mining for Real", invited guest lecture, School of Computer Science, National University of Singapore, Singapore, 4 April 2008.
• "Computing Protein-Protein Interactions", invited guest lecture, School of Biological Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 29 August 2007.
• "Mining the Protein-Protein Interaction Networks", invited speaker for the Bioinformatics for Biologists seminar series by the Office of Life Sciences, National University of Singapore, 30 January 2007.
• "Fishing for Knowledge in Real-World Networks", invited speaker at the Knowledge Management Workshop, Exploit Technologies, Singapore, 10 January 2007.
• "Unraveling the Common Denominators in Protein-Protein Interaction Networks", invited keynote speaker for the International Symposium on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (ISBB06), Bhubaneshwar, India, 15-17 December 2006.
• "Uncovering the Biological Building Blocks for Protein Interaction Networks", invited plenary speaker for the 8th National Symposium on Biology, Malaysia, 5-7 December 2006.
• "Unraveling Multi-Domain Dependencies in Protein-Protein Interactions", invited keynote speaker for the First International Conference on Computational Systems Biology (ICCSB-2006), Shanghai, 20-23 July 2006.
• "Mining for Gold in Mountains of Unstructured Text", invited speaker for the Identifying and Managing Unstructured Information Conference, The Ark Group, Singapore, 26-28 April 2006.
• "Extracting and Exploiting Protein-Protein Contrasts from Biomedical Literature", invited speaker for the CHIME Text Processing Seminar, School of Computing, National University of Singapore, 1 Mar 2006.
• "BioContrasts: Extracting and Exploiting Protein-Protein Contrasts from Biomedical Literature", invited speaker for the First International Symposium on Languages in Biology and Medicine, KAIST, Korea, 26 Nov 2005.
• "Computational Purification of Protein Interactomes Using Network Topological Metrics", invited lecture for the BIOINFO2005 AASBi Conference, Busan, Korea, 23 September 2005.
• "Detecting False Positives and False Negatives in Protein Interactome using Network Topology", invited lecture for the NTU BIRC Workshop on Computational Analysis of Proteomics Data, NTU, Singapore, 16 June 2005.
• "Smart Bio-Laboratories of the Future", invited paper for ISCAS 2005: Life Science Systems, Kobe, Japan, 26 May 2005.
• "Detecting False Positives and False Negatives in Protein Interactome using Network Topology", invited seminar for IMS Workshop on Data Analysis and Data Mining in Proteomics, NUS, Singapore, 12 May 2005.
• "A Better Tomorrow with Bioinformatics", invited lecture for ACJC Symposium, ACJC, Singapore, 15 Mar 2005.
• "Enabling On-the-Go Equipment Access in a Smart Bio-Laboratory", invited presentation for Digital Convergence Conference, Singapore, 27 Sep 2004.
• "Literature Mining for Interaction Pathway Discovery", proposal presentation for TREC Genomics Pre-Track Presentation, JDCL-2002, Portland, USA, 18 Jul 2002.
  
• "Literature Mining for Interaction Pathway Discovery", invited seminar for IMS Workshop on Post-genome Knowledge Discovery, NUS, Singapore, 30 May 2002.
• "Pathweaver: System, Studies, Results, Collaboration", Invited Workshop on NLP and Ontology in Biology, Tokyo, Japan, 20 Feb 2002.
• "Laboratories of the Future: Accelerating Life Sciences Research with Leading-edge IT", invited speaker at the National Library, Singapore, 16 Oct 2001.
• "Decoding the Book of Life: Sequences, Genotypes, A, C, G, and T", invited speaker at the National Library, Singapore, 20 Mar 2001.

CONSULTANCY AND ADJUNCT APPOINTMENTS

• AI Expert Advisor (Consultancy), ST Engineering Electronics, Singapore. 2018 - 2020.


• Associate Professor (Adjunct), Department of Biochemistry, National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore. 2010 - 2012.


• Associate Professor (Adjunct), School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. 2003 - 2010.


• Research Fellow (Adjunct), Singapore Eye Research Institute (SERI), National University of Singapore, Singapore. 2007-2010.