After 8 years of education in NUS as an undergraduate and postgraduate, I began my Research and Development career in 1995 as a research team leader for Smart Antenna Project at the Centre for Wireless Communications, before it became the Institute for Infocomm Research (I²R) in November 2002.  I was glad to be able to apply my expertise in signal processing in a job I liked.  In this project, my focus was on blind signal equalization and array signal processing. I learnt a lot about wireless communication systems, starting with the cordless phone standard like DECT to 3G cellular mobile phones through this project. Having opportunities to deal with actual systems have broadened my interest to system design, wireless channel propagation and system performance analysis for general wireless communication systems.  In my next project, which was smart antenna for 3G W-CDMA systems, my team has augmented our expertise into the next level of achievement; we filed a couple of patents and managed to receive a Vehicular Technology Conference best paper award in 1999.

Year 2000 was a year of research and career ‘disruption’ for me. Research ‘disruption’ was when I took up a short-term project with General Electric on Ultra wideband synchronization analysis; a change in my research area that required different research skill set and knowledge.  A career ‘disruption’ resulted when I was given the responsibilities of team management with the bigger challenge in interpersonal relationships.  Though it was tough to catch up in the beginning, it did give me great sense of satisfaction and achievement.  The precious experience attained in this short industry project had given me the confidence to “tackle” the great challenges ahead – pushing technologies into standards.  Being engaged in the standardization game for the past 4 years had been both challenging and rewarding to me.  Technical alliance, diplomatic negotiation, late-night teleconferencing and patent strategies – these are the ingredients of the game to ‘commercialize our research’, besides the usual internal discussion and intensive simulation.  I could still vividly remember a moment when I had to burn the mid-night oil in the office just to meet the proposal submission deadline.  I am grateful that our standards contribution eventually won us the IES Prestigious Engineering Achievement Award.

I²R is a place of fun and friendship as well.  I enjoyed particularly the I²R Olympics Sports Day, organized by the Social Committee in I²R all these years, the casual table soccer matches and occasional racquet games with a couple of colleagues.  It is also a place of scenery and solitude – a magnificent sea view out of my office window does hold back life’s hectic pace slightly and taking occasional breathers and prayers at the roof top ‘garden’ overseeing the horizon definitely help me to find inner peace.

What makes a good researcher?  I would say three P’s: Passion for research and learning, Plan for your approach and success, and lastly Perseverance for achieving your goals.  Over the last 10 years that I have been with I²R, I can testify that our organization has indeed the working atmosphere and ample opportunities for everyone to enthuse passion, execute plans and exhibit perseverance.

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Louis Shue
Assistant Programme Manager, Assistive ICT Systems for Monitoring and Rehabilitation Programme

Upon completion of my PhD studies at the Australian National University in 1999, I decided to seek a career in R&D in Singapore. Why Singapore, you may ask? Well, it is a different country, which borders between Asia and a western country – Australia. It did seem fun, both culturally and geographically.

Having been educated and living in Australia for most of my life, Singapore represented a big cultural change. While not as multi-cultural as I was used to back in Australia, the different racial groups here are very rooted in their respective traditions and it was interesting to observe as an outsider. Another adjustment I had to make upon arrival is the slightly more rigid management style and presence of many rules, which is different but perhaps at times more efficient.

After joining I²R in late 1999, I have worked on a diverse range of projects. One of the early highlights was being part of a small team working on a 3-year project, where a small object of a few pixels in a video sequence was required to be detected and tracked. Subsequently, I have been involved in speech/audio processing and microphone array research. Since 2001, I have been privileged to lead a research team. This was quite a challenge which allowed me to not only look at problems at the microscopic (technical) level, but also the larger picture of how the group’s work would fit with the general research direction of I²R. In addition, as part of my job, I was given many opportunities to interact with leading scientists in my field at the international conferences I had attended.

In my current capacity as the driver for a number of ICT-for-healthcare projects, e.g. tele-health and remote monitoring, there is an even greater need for interaction with people outside of our own domain. In other words, this includes not only the various research groups internally, it involved the other research institutes under the A*STAR family, as well as engaging physicians and IT professionals from various local hospitals. This was another personal challenge since most of my colleagues and I were not trained in healthcare. However, it was satisfying to see applications of some of our work to living people and to know that we could make a difference to people’s lives.

To me, a good attitude for a research scientist to have is to never be afraid of failures. The important point is to remain open-minded, be humble and learn from past mistakes. At the same time, we as technical researchers must always remain critical in answering tough questions. However, at the end of the day, you should have conviction and confidence in your beliefs. Finally, especially when things do not go well occasionally, try not to take yourself too seriously.

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Anantharaman Lakshminarayanan
Research Scientist, Cryptography& Security Department

It has been over nine years since I have joined I²R which was then called Institute of Systems Science. I had just finished my Masters degree from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and was looking for a "researchy" job. I wanted a job that allows me to work independently and has the freedom to pursue my research interests without being closely monitored by my supervisors on a daily basis on my work progress. I had also wanted to work in a place full of researchers and scientists hoping that their enthusiasm and energy will inspire me. That's why I joined I²R.

I currently work on information security. My focus is to develop commercializable security systems. I am currently working on projects related to efficient PKI revocation schemes, next generation DRM schemes and user-friendly security for personal devices. As one can see, these are diverse interests and I²R provides me the space and time to work on these areas. A few years back, when PKI was becoming hot, a big multinational company (MNC) licensed a prototype PKI system developed by me. I spent one month at this MNC’s  Melbourne office helping that company develop their own PKI system. It was especially satisfying to see a complete system developed by me being commercialized. I had also been lucky to work on other projects which had seen good commercialization success. I sincerely believe that research is good only if it has practical benefits and can eventually be commercialized.

Life at I²R is relaxed yet challenging. Although my bosses do not supervise me on a day-to-day basis, but they definitely expect me to deliver on results . I love the challenges presented in my research work as commercialization of research is not always as straightforward as it might seem, it entails a lots of risks as well. A researcher should be passionate to do something BIG. If you want to make a small change to an existing system, I would advise you to join the industry instead of a research institute. Aim for the moon and sometimes we can reach the tree top. Aim for the treetop and most probably you will be close to ground forever.

Singapore is a great place to work in. It is safe, convenient and close to home. My home is in India, just 3.5 hours (flight time) from Chennai. My door-to-door time from Singapore to Chennai was just 5 hours. I could finish work at 5:30 PM and be at my Chennai home by 12 midnight! Life in Singapore is fun. Many people said that Singapore is dull. I disagree completely. I personally feel that they have not seen or do not know what Singapore can offer. A place is as interesting as one is willing to make it out to be. Having this belief, I have met many fun people from many parts of the world in Singapore. And of course, I like working at I²R.

It seems that there is not enough time in my life to accommodate all the activities brought on by the many friendships forged and interests in Singapore. These activities includes checking out the books at NUS library, which I believe to be one of the best libraries in the world, working out in the gym (I²R has its own in-house gym), learning Mandarin which is both fun and very challenging, liken to doing research work, and of course hanging out with my friends during the weekends or clubbing.