Professor Ong Yew Soon

Chief Artificial Intelligence Scientist, A*STAR
President's Chair Professor of Computer Science, NTU

Professor Ong Yew Soon was appointed Chief Artificial Intelligence (AI) Scientist of A*STAR on 1 May 2019. He is concurrently a President’s Chair Professor of Computer Science at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He serves as Director of Data Science and AI Research Centre, co-Director of the Singtel-NTU Cognitive & Artificial Intelligence Joint Lab, and the A*STAR SIMTECH-NTU Joint Lab on Complex Systems.

Prof Ong Yew Soon graduated from NTU with a Bachelor of Engineering (First Class Honours) and Master of Engineering, both in Electrical and Electronics Engineering. He holds a PhD from University of Southampton, United Kingdom. He was Chair of School of Computer Science and Engineering (SCSE) at NTU from Feb 2016 to August 2018, Director of Centre for Computational Intelligence from 2008-2015 and Programme Principal Investigator of the Data Analytics & Complex System Programme in the Rolls-Royce@NTU Corporate Lab from 2013-2016. He has made significant scientific contributions in computer science and engineering, played a critical leadership role in establishing and strengthening cross disciplinary research in NTU, propelling NTU to be one of the leading computer science and engineering departments globally and ranked top in AI research. In particular, NTU was ranked 1st in Asia for Computer Science and Engineering by the Academic Ranking of World Universities, 4th by US News Global University Ranking and listed as one of the top three universities in AI research globally by The World University Ranking.

An internationally-acclaimed computer scientist, Professor Ong was conferred the IEEE Grade of Fellow for his seminal works in computational and artificial intelligence, specifically memetic computation and applications. Thomson Reuters lists him as a Highly Cited researcher and among the World's Most Influential Scientific Minds. He is the founding Editor-In-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence, and serves on the editorial board of several other leading journals including the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, IEEE Transactions on Neural Network & Learning Systems and IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics.

Professor Ong was bestowed the 2019 Public Administration Medal (Silver) by the President of the Republic of Singapore in recognition of his contributions to education in Singapore and dedicated service to NTU. He served as a National Research Foundation (NRF) Scientific Advisor of the Singapore Digital Economy Initiative and as Management & Scientific committee member of AI Singapore. He has been instrumental in anchoring research and industry collaborations with national and international organisations in Singapore, and holds advisory roles to leading universities, companies and government agencies.