Dr LEONG Mun Kew is currently Director, Graduate Programmes at the Institute of Systems Science (ISS) at the National University of Singapore (NUS). NUS-ISS provides practice-based and continuing education, focused on innovation, leadership and creating deep technical expertise for Singapore’s Smart Nation journey. Mun Kew is responsible for ISS’ graduate programmes: the Stackable Programme in Artificial Intelligence (leading to the Master of Technology (MTech) in Intelligent Systems) develops students who will power the Smart Nation initiatives in reasoning, vision, language processing and autonomous robotics; the Stackable Programme in Data Science (leading to the MTech Enterprise Business Analytics) uses data and models to ensure better business decisions; the Stackable Programme in Smart Systems & Platforms (leading to the MTech Software Engineering) provides the platforms and processes for robust and secure systems – it’s the software that makes systems smart! – and the MTech IT Leadership creates the future digital leaders to make the smart nation a reality.

Before joining ISS, Mun Kew was with the Singapore National Library Board (NLB) as Chief Technology Officer and Deputy CIO. Before joining NLB, he was Principal Scientist and Programme Director for Services Research at the A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R). In his 20-year research career, Mun Kew’s personal research was in information retrieval, digital libraries, distributed multilingual search systems and media semantics, and he also looked after research groups in media semantics, natural language processing, security, distributed systems, data mining and analytics. From 1999 to 2001, Mun Kew was VP and CTO of an IT start-up delivering custom distributed deep search technologies and services. He has published a bunch of papers, has a few patents and has been an invited keynote speaker in more international events than he can remember.

Mun Kew received his PhD from Stanford University. He has more than 30 years of R&D and commercial experience in IT. He was Chair and Editor of the ISO JPSearch international standard, past editor of various journals, committee chairs for conference & symposium series, steering committees, etc. MunKew is a Senior Member of the Singapore Computer Society and was a council member of the ITMA for many years.