Laboratory Director

Professor Lawrence Wong is the Head of the ECE Department in the Faculty of Engineering, National University of Singapore (NUS). He is concurrently Deputy Director of the Interactive and Digital Media Institute at NUS. He was previously Executive Director of the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) from Nov 2002 - Nov 2006. Since joining NUS in 1983, he served in various positions at the department, faculty and university levels, including Director of the Computer Centre at NUS from Jul 2000 - Nov 2002, Director of the Centre for Instructional Technology, NUS, from Jan 1998 - Jun 2000. Prior to joining NUS in 1983, he was a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Crawford Hill Lab, NJ, USA from 1980 to 1983.

Prof Wong's research areas of interest include mobile radio communication systems, robust digital speech communications, robust video communications systems and multimedia network protocols and systems. He has published over 200 papers in international journals and conferences in these areas. He and his co-authors received the IEE Marconi Premium Award in 1989 and Best Paper Award in the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME) in 2006.

More details are available at: Personal Homepage

More details are available at: Personal Homepage

Alexander Nareyek directs the Interactive Intelligence Labs (II Labs) and the Multi-Disciplinary Games Lab at the National University of Singapore, where he also holds an Assistant Professorship.

He received his diploma and Ph.D. from the TU Berlin/Germany, held positions at GMD-FIRST/Germany, Carnegie Mellon University/USA, and the Cork Constraint Computation Centre/Ireland, and served as CEO and CTO for Digital Drama Studios/Czech Republic. He is one of the leading figures in the field of game AI and serves on numerous academic and industrial committees. For the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), he is responsible for matters regarding artificial intelligence, and serves as chairperson of the IGDA's Artificial Intelligence Interface Standards Committee.

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Mohan Kankanhalli is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore. He is also the Vice-Dean for Academic Affairs and Graduate Studies at the NUS School of Computing. Mohan obtained his BTech (Electrical Engineering) from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, in 1986 and his MS and PhD (Computer and Systems Engineering) from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1998 and 1990, respectively. He then joined the Institute of Systems Science (ISS - now Institute for Infocomm Research) in Singapore in 1990. He mainly worked on content-based retrieval in the multimedia group. He spent the 1997-1998 academic year at the Department of Electrical Engineering of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He visited the Garage Cinema Group of the University of California at Berkeley during Jan-Jun 2004.

He is actively involved in organizing of many major conferences in the area of Multimedia. He is on the editorial boards of several journals including the ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, Springer Multimedia Systems Journal, Pattern Recognition Journal and the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security.

His current research interests are in Multimedia Systems (content processing, retrieval) and Multimedia Security (surveillance, digital rights management and forensics).

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Adrian David Cheok is Director of the Mixed Reality Lab, National University of Singapore. He is Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

He has previously worked in real-time systems, soft computing, and embedded computing in Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (Osaka, Japan). He has been working on research covering mixed reality, human-computer interaction, wearable computers and smart spaces, fuzzy systems, embedded systems, power electronics, and multi-modal recognition. He has successfully obtained funding for externally funded projects in the area of wearable computers and mixed reality from Nike, National Oilwell Varco, Defense Science Technology Agency, Ministry of Communications and Arts, National Arts Council, Singapore Science Center, Hougang Primary School. The research output has included numerous high quality academic journal papers, research prototype deliverables numerous demonstrations including to the President and Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore, broadcast television worldwide broadcasts on his research (such as CNN/CNBC/Discovery/National Geographic), and international invited new media exhibits such as in Ars Electronica and Wired Nextfest.

He is currently an Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore where he leads a team of over 20 researchers and students. He has been a keynote and invited speaker at numerous international and local conferences and events. He is invited to exhibit for two years in the Ars Electronica Museum of the Future, launching in the Ars Electronica Festival 2003. His works "Human Pacman" and "Magic Land" were selected as one of the worlds top inventions by Wired and invited to be exhibited in Wired NextFest 2005. He was invited to show the works "Human Pacman" and "Magic Land" at Wired NextFest 2005. He was IEEE Singapore Section Chairman 2003, and is presently ACM SIGCHI Chapter President. He was awarded the Hitachi Fellowship 2003, the A-STAR Young Scientist of the Year Award 2003, and the SCS Singapore Young Professional of the Year Award 2004. In 2004 he was invited to be the Singapore representative of the United Nations body IFIP SG 16 on Entertainment Computing and the founding and present Chairman of the Singapore Computer Society Special Interest Group on Entertainment Computing. Also in 2004, he was awarded an Associate of the Arts award by the Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts, Singapore. In 2005 he was awarded the Microsoft Research Fellowship. He is Editor/Associate Editor of the following academic journals: The Open Electrical and Electronic Engineering Journal, Advances in Human Computer Interaction, International Journal of Entertainment Technology and Management (IJEntTM), Virtual Reality (Springer-Verlag), International Journal of Virtual Reality, and The Journal of Virtual Reality and Broadcasting.

Professor Cheok, who was born and raised in Adelaide Australia, graduated from the University of Adelaide with a Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical and Electronic) with First Class Honors in 1992 and an Engineering PhD in 1998.

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Kay O'Halloran is Director of the Multimodal Analysis Lab, National University of Singapore. She is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language & Literature at the National University of Singapore where she has been teaching and undertaking research in multimodal discourse analysis since 1998.

Kay O'Halloran is an internationally recognised scholar in multimodal analysis and she has given plenary addresses on multimodal approaches to mathematics and science and the use of digital technology for multimodal analysis at international conferences in Australia, England, Japan, Italy, Austria and Finland. Kay O'Halloran established the multimedia laboratory, the Laboratory for Research in Semiotics (LRS) in the Department of English Language & Literature in 2000 to undertake research in multimodality with her Semiotics Research Group (SRG). She is editor of Multimodal Discourse Analysis (2004, reprinted 2006), a volume featuring her postgraduate students' research in multimodality, and her latest publications include Mathematical Discourse: Language, Symbolism and Visual Images (2005). She developed Systemics 1.0 software for linguistic analysis, in collaboration with Associate Professor Kevin Judd (Mathematics Department, University of Western Australia) in 2002.

Kay O'Halloran received her Ph.D. degree in Communication Studies from Murdoch University (Western Australia), and her B.Sc. (mathematics), Dip.Ed. and B.Ed. (1st Class Honours) from the University of Western Australia.

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Associate Professor Milagros (Millie) Rivera is the head of the Communications and New Media Programme in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the National University of Singapore. She is also the director of the Social and Cognitive Lab in NUS Interactive and Digital Media Institute.

She joined NUS in July 2002 as a visiting fellow while she was a tenured associate professor in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University, U.S.A. She became the head of CNM in 2004 and under her leadership CNM's enrollment tripled and its full time teaching staff quintupled in only three years. CNM offers an integrated curriculum in communication management, new media studies and new/interactive media design with lecturers from more than 15 countries and disciplines ranging from engineering, computing, visual and interactive design, public relations, communications, sociology, psychology, economics, law and policy, and arts and humanities.

Dr. Rivera, an eight-time award winning educator, teaches information and communications policy, impact of new media on society, and new media regulation. Her current research involves a study of information and communication technologies localization policies in 14 developing Asian countries and a six-country study exploring how young people use interactive and digital media in small and medium towns in developing Asia.

She is in the advisory board of ideacorp, Philippines, an organization devoted to research, training and advocacy on the use of information and communication technologies for development; LIRNEasia, Sri Lanka, a regional information and communication technology policy and regulation capacity-building organization whose research seeks to identify the institutional constraints to effective use of ICTs to improve the lives of the people of the Asia Pacific; and Communication for Policy Research-South, an organization that seeks to develop capacity, stimulate interest, and promote research and systematic study in information and communication technology policy and regulatory issues in the South. She is also a member of the Advisory Committee on the Impact of New Media on Society (AIMS), set up by Singapore's Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts to study the far-reaching social, ethical, legal and regulatory implications of Singapore's rapidly-growing interactive and digital media (IDM) sector and recommend how the government should manage these issues. In addition, she is in the editorial board of the Journal of Information and Knowledge Management; Journal of Communication Law and Policy, and Digital Review of Asia Pacific, a biennial comprehensive guide to the state-of-practice and trends in information and communication technologies for development in Asia Pacific published by Sage.

Dr. Rivera's work has been published in New Media and Society, Journalism and Mass Communication Monographs, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Journalism History, The Urban Lawyer, Hastings Communications and Entertainment Law Journal, Federal Communications Law Journal, World Internet Law Report, Communications and the Law, Cuadernos de Informacion (a Chilean academic journal), Asian Pacific Law and Policy Journal, Media Asia and Asian Journal of Communication. From 1999 to 2003, she was the author of the broadcast regulation chapter in Communication and the Law, a media law book published by Vision Press, U.S.A. She has lectured on regulatory issues related to information and communication technologies in U.S.A., Canada, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Japan, Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Geneva, Poland, and Chile.

More details are available at: Personal Homepage

Professor Shuzhi Sam Ge, IEEE Fellow, PhD, DIC, BSc, P.Eng, is founding Director of Social Robotics Lab of Interactive Digital Media Institute, and Director of Edutainment Robotics Lab of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the National University of Singapore. He has Co-authored three books: Adaptive Neural Network Control of Robotic Manipulators (World Scientific, 1998), Stable Adaptive Neural Network Control (Kluwer, 2001) and Switched Linear Systems: Control and Design (Springer-Verlag, 2005), edited a book: Autonomous Mobile Robots: Sensing, Control, Decision Making and Applications (Taylor and Francis, 2006), and over 300 international journal and conference papers.

His current research interests include social robotics, multimedia fusion, adaptive control, intelligent systems and artificial intelligence. He is a co-founder of Personal E-Motion Pte Ltd dedicated to interactive multimedia digital books for education and digital publishing.

He is the founding Editor-in-Chief, International Journal of Social Robotics, Springer. He has served/been serving as an Associate Editor for a number of flagship journals including IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, and Automatica. He also serves as a book Editor of the Taylor & Francis Automation and Control Engineering Series.

He has been serving as Chair of Technical Committee on Intelligent Control, IEEE Control Systems Society since 2005, member of Multimedia Tutorials Committee, IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, 2005, IFAC Technical Committee on Cognition and Control (TCCC), 2003-Present, and an elected member of Board of Governors, IEEE Control Systems Society, 2007-2009. He served as the inaugural General Chair of IEEE Multi-conference on Systems and Control, Singapore 2007, and the General Chair of the IEEE International Symposium on Intelligent Control, Taipei, 2004.

He was the recipient of the Fellow, IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers), USA, 2006; Outstanding Overseas Young Research Award, National Science Foundation, China, 2004; Inaugural Temasek Young Investigator Award, Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA), Singapore, 2002; Outstanding Young Researcher Award, National University of Singapore, 2001, National Technology Award of the National Science & Technology Board, Singapore,1999. He provides technical consultancy to industrial and government agencies.

He was born in Shandong, grew up in Manchuria (Heilongjiang), China, and lives with his wife and three children in Singapore. He obtained his BSc degree from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (BUAA) in 1986, and the PhD degree and the Diploma of Imperial College (DIC) from Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine.

More details are available at: Personal Homepage