Biography

I obtained my PhD in computer science from National University of Singapore (NUS), and was the winner of the Best PhD Thesis Award. I hold an honorary senior fellow position at University of Melbourne and an associate professor position at RMIT. I am the Head of the Big Data and Database Group at the RMIT Center of Information Discovery and Data Analytics. I am the Chair for Higher Degree Research at RMIT Computer Science, chairing PhD students’ thesis committee.

I was the director of RMIT master of data science program (2018-2019). Under my leadership, I have created a novel form of data science postgraduate project to support diverse sectors and disciplines within RMIT and put cross-disciplinary collaboration into practice, resulting in a double-win – students are ready to work through those real-life data science projects; people outside of DS but have strong Data Analysis needs get their problem solved. I also co-created the RMIT-MIT micro-credential program in data science, bringing novel pathways for students, where RMIT is the first university in Australia having this connected pathway for data science education.

My research is supported by Google (Two-time Google Research Award recipient), Australasian Research Council and Data61. I am generally interested in big data management, data visualization, information retrieval, and applied machine learning to each of the aforementioned topics. In particular, I propose the topic of Civil Computing and has made contributions in developing interactive visualized data exploration frameworks to bring big data back to a human scale, to make big data empower everyone for optimal decision making.

I am looking for PhD/master students to work with me on demanding Urban Data Analytics projects under my civil computing team. If you are a highly motivated student and interested in doing big data research, please contact me.

More demonstration videos of my group’s projects are in our youtube channel.