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Dr. Tan Geok Leng, MIET CEng
Acting Executive Director
Dr. Tan Geok Leng joined I²R as its Acting Executive Director in February 2012. Before taking on this role at I²R, he was Deputy Executive Director at the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) and prior to that, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA).
Dr. Tan is an industry veteran with over 30 years of working experience in a large variety of roles and organizations. At Motorola, he developed two-way handheld radios and pagers, while his responsibilities at Scientific Generics, a business and technology consulting firm based in Cambridge, UK, included technical and business consultation to a wide range of public and private sector companies.
Dr. Tan also led high tech start-up companies such as Goldtron Telecommunications and Syspac Technologies. Goldtron Telecommunications was one of Singapore’s first home-grown communications product company designing and producing pagers, cordless telephones and GSM cellular phones for the European and Chinese markets and one of the first to ship such products to Europe and China. Syspac Technologies was a spin-off from a local research institute using advanced thin-film multi-chip module packaging technology, licensed from Bell Labs, and further developed internally, to provide advanced semiconductor packaging solutions to the industry.
As CTO at IDA, his responsibilities included developing a deep understanding of how new infocomm technologies might impact the economy and formulating ways for such technologies to be adopted in Singapore. He led the team that developed the iconic Intelligent Nation 2015 (iN2015) Master plan which now serves as the guide for Singapore’s infocomm development for the next 10 years. The iN2015 team was honored with the MICA Merit Award in 2006 in recognition for their contributions to Singapore.
In his capacity as the Deputy Executive Director at SERC, Dr Tan chaired the SERC Promotions Committee (2011) and he was the co-chair of the A*STAR-NEA partnership to bring technological solutions to problems faced by the national agency. He was also the Programme Manager for the “Future Data Center Technologies” TSRP. He represented A*STAR at the IDA-lead, Telecommunications Standards Advisory Committee.
Dr. Tan supports infocomm talent development in Singapore by participating in NUS’s Electrical & Computer Engineering, Department Consultative Committee, the NYP’s Engineering Advisory Committee and the SITF 2011 Awards Committee. He was a member of the Singapore Youth Awards, Science & Technology selection panel. He has been an active public speaker, speaking at career development functions organized by the IET, NUS and SMU. He also speaks at industry events such as the IEEE DYSPAN 2010, Unwired 2010, CROWNCOM 2008, MobileMonday: Futurescape 2009 and the Uptime Institute’s Global Telepresence on Energy efficiency.
Dr. Tan received his B.Sc (First Class) in Electronics and Communications Engineering from Birmingham University in 1980. He was conferred a PhD by Cambridge University in 1990 for research into Digital Communications. His PhD was funded by a scholarship from the Kuok Foundation. He attended the Wharton Advanced Management Programme in 2007 and the Executive Programme at the Singularity University in 2011.
Prof. Lye Kin Mun
- Advisor, I²R
- Deputy Executive Director, A*STAR's Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC)
Professor Lye Kin Mun holds a PhD and a Bachelor's degree, all in Electrical Engineering from the University of Hawaii, Honolulu and University of Alberta, Canada respectively. He is an adjunct professor in the Electrical Engineering Department of National University of Singapore (NUS). He has a rich and varied background in communications technology R&D, working with government agencies and world-class R&D laboratories.
Kin Mun was previously the Director of the Centre for Wireless Communications (CWC). Under his leadership, CWC grew to become an internationally recognised R&D organisation in leading-edge wireless communications technology. In 2006, he was bestowed the title of 'Officier dans l’ordre des Palmes Academiques' by the French Government.
Dr. Cheah Kok Beng
Director, Industry development & Corporate Services
Beng Cheah is currently the Director of the Industry Development and Corporate Services departments at the Institute for Infocomm Research.
Beng enjoys working with people and technology. He has extensive experience in large-scale, multi-disciplinary project management, business operations and general management. He was previously the Director for the Datacomm & Network Systems business at a SingTel subsidiary. He was responsible for the sales & marketing, projects & engineering, and profit & loss of the systems integration business. Under his leadership, his team achieved significant revenue growth, won and implemented many advanced, multi-million dollar telecommunications and networking projects in Singapore.
Earlier, Beng worked for GEC Plessey Telecommunications and Telecom Corporation of New Zealand where he developed real-time software for mission-critical applications and played project management and technical consultancy roles for cross-national projects in New Zealand, United Kingdom and Indonesia.
Beng received BE (1st Class Honours) in Electrical & Electronic Engineering from the University of Auckland, NZ. He gained an MBA from California State University, East Bay and completed the Program for Global Leadership at the Harvard Business School. He earned a Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA) from the University of South Australia for his research in the diffusion of innovations.
Prof. Michael Chia
Deputy Executive Director, Industry
Prof. Chia Yan Wah, Michael received the BSc (1st Class Honours) and Ph.D. from Loughborough University, U.K. He was a recipient of both the Overseas Research Student (ORS) Awards from UK and the Research Studentship Award from the British Aerospace System, PLC.
He joined I²R (the former Center for Wireless Communications-CWC) in 1994 as a Member of Technical Staff. Since then, he has led several major projects over the years and in 2003 became the Division Director of Communications Division, leading a team of 200 research scientists and engineers. From FY 2007 to FY 2009, he led the Programme of Power Aware Wireless Sensor network as Programme Director. In Nov 2008, Prof. Chia was appointed as the Programme Manager for the SERC Inter-RI programme, spanning across five Research Institutes, in TeraHertz science and technology. He also manages I²R's Programme on Sustainable Mobility for Intelligent Transportation. Since April 2011, he became the Deputy Executive Director of Industry for I²R.
Prof. Chia does research in the areas of radio frequency, communications and sensing. To-date, he has authored and co-authored 161 peer-reviewed publications (73 in journals and 88 in conferences). He has been invited as a keynote speaker and presenters in several international conferences. He was the General Chair of the IEEE International Conference on UWB in 2007 and General co-chair in IEEE International Workshop of Antenna Technology in 2005. He is also a technical reviewer for several international leading journals, conferences and European research funding agency. He is a member of the Executive Committee of International Conference on UltraWideBand and the Editorial Board of IEEE Transaction of Microwave Theory and Techniques. In Singapore, he has served in Infocomm Development Authority (IDA), as a member of Telecommunications Standards Advisory Committee and Radio Technical Committee and technical reviewer for SPRING. He has also contributed as a Technical Advisory Member for some local companies including Rohde & Schwartz Communications & Measurements (Asia) and SME.
During his tenure here, he has led many initiatives in use-inspired research and developments in Infocomm Technology which has attracted many major R&D projects with the industry. Visit his personal website.
Prof. Susanto Rahardja
Deputy Executive Director, Research
Professor Susanto Rahardja received the B.Eng. degree from the National University of Singapore in 1991, and the M.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees from the Nanyang Technological University in 1993 and 1997 respectively, all in Electrical Engineering. His research interests include multimedia signal processing and interactive digital media in which he has published more than 250 publications in internationally refereed journals and conferences. He joined the Centre for Signal Processing at Nanyang Technological University as a research engineer in 1996 and was later appointed as Assistant Director of the Centre in 2001. He was the Director of Media Division at the Institute for Infocomm Research (I²R) from 2002 to 2007, where he led 150 full-time researchers in a broad range of media related research that cover areas in Signal Processing (audio coding, video/image processing), Media Analysis (text/speech, image, video), Media Security (biometrics, computer vision and surveillance) and Sensor Networks. At I²R, he is currently the Deputy Executive Director (Research) where he oversees all the research activities, and is also the Head of Signal Processing Department as well as a Principal Scientist.
Professor Rahardja was the recipient of the IEE Hartree Premium Award for the best journal paper published in IEE Proceedings in 2002. From 2002 - 2007, he actively participated in the international ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11 (Moving Picture Expert Group, or MPEG) where he contributed to the development of MPEG-4 Scalable to Lossless System (SLS) in which the technology was adopted as Reference Model 0 by MPEG in July 2003. In 2003, he received the Tan Kah Kee Young Inventors’ Gold award in the Open Category for his contributions to scalable to lossless audio compression technology. This technology was subsequently published as a normative international standard in June 2006 (ISO/IEC 14496-3:2005/Amd.3:2006). He also led the team to develop an adaptive predictor technology for the audio lossless codec which was incorporated in the MPEG-4 Audio Lossless System (ALS) under the high performance profile (ISO/IEC 14496-3:2005/Amd.2:2006). In recognition of his significant contributions to the national standardization program, Prof. Rahardja was awarded the Standards Council Merit Award by SPRING Singapore in 2006. In addition, for leadership and technical contribution to advancement of digital audio signal processing and its adoption to the MPEG, he was awarded the National Technology Award in 2007. He also received the A*STAR Most Inspiring Mentor Award in 2008, I²R Achiever of the Year Award (Research) in 2007, I²R Achiever of the Year Award (Development) in 2009, I²R Achiever of the Year Award (Research) in 2010, and was a Finalist of the 2010 World Technology & Summit Award, as well as other awards.
Prof. Rahardja has served in several boards, advisory and technical committees in various ACM, IEEE and SPIE related professional activities in the areas of multimedia He is one of the elected members of the Technical Committee of the Visual Signal Processing and Communications, Circuits and Systems for Communications and Multimedia Systems and Applications of the IEEE Circuits & Systems Society. He was the Associate Editors for IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing from 2007 – 2011. Currently, he is serving as the Associate Editors for the Elsevier Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation and IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. He served as the Conference Chair of Multimedia Systems and Applications at SPIE OpticsEast Symposium from 2006 to 2007 as well as Symposium Co-chair of the IEEE International Symposium on Multiple-Valued logic in 2006. He was also the Industry and Government Advisor of 1st ACM SIGGRAPHASIA 2008, the General Chair of 7th ACM SIGGRAPH VRCAI 2008 and General Chair of Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA) Annual Summit and Conference 2010. Since 2004, he is the Council member of National IT Standards Committee in Singapore. In 2005, he chaired a thematic strategic research program at A*STAR in the “mobile media” theme where more than US$5 millions projects were awarded. He served as a panel member for Science & Technology Plan 2015 and Science & Technology Value Creation 2015 for A*STAR. He is currently the President of SIGGRAPH Singapore Chapter (SSC) and Southeast Asia Graphics (SEAGRAPH) society, Board of Governor of Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA), Member of the Management Board of Interactive Digital Media Institute at the National University of Singapore and Scientific Advisor of Faculty of Computer Science, Prince of Songkla University in Thailand. Prof. Rahardja holds an adjunct appointment of Full Professor at the National University of Singapore. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
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