Dr Quek Boon-Kiat double-hats as both Deputy Executive Director at A*STAR IHDP and Department Director of the Social and Cognitive Computing (SCC) department at A*STAR’s Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC).
A pioneer of psychographic modelling and inference technology within the SCC department of IHPC, Dr Quek boasts extensive experience in software prototyping, research validation, and IP creation. He is well-versed in artificial intelligence (AI) – specifically autonomous robotic systems, with emphasis on computational modelling and simulation of social information processing mechanisms.
He joined IHPC in 2008 as one of two pioneering members of the Computational Social Cognition visiting investigatorship programme (VIP), led by Northwestern University’s Prof Andrew Ortony, a world-renowned researcher in computational social cognition and affective computing. The VIP eventually led to the formation of the SCC department in 2014. Since then, Dr Quek has been leading a multidisciplinary team of computer scientists and AI researchers, cognitive scientists, psychologists, and engineers, to translate the understanding of human psychology and cognition into real-world solutions.
His pioneering work on the development and use of network models of socio-cognitive constructs to perform psychographic inference and reasoning has gained industry attention especially in the HR, Consumer, Healthcare, and Fintech application domains, where productisation and commercialisation efforts with A*ccelerate are currently underway. Such efforts also include the deployment of some of his research work towards internal use, such as the trial deployment of a career self-discovery portal that could generate inferences about users’ innate psychological traits, vocational interests, and career inclinations.
Dr Quek was also a recipient of the prestigious A*STAR Graduate Scholarship in 2003, and the A*STAR Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2010. As a form of giving-back, he has been actively involved in A*STAR Graduate Academy (A*GA)’s scholarship outreach activities, including speaking to prospective scholarship applicants and science teachers from secondary schools and junior colleges, mentorship of junior A*GA scholars, serving on scholarship interview panels and judging various science competitions (A*STAR Talent Search, Singapore Science & Engineering Fair, A*STAR Research Attachment Symposium).
He obtained both his Bachelor of Engineering and PhD in Robotics and Autonomous Systems from the National University of Singapore.
Find out more about him here.
PUBLICATIONS
