Tham, Chen Khong’s webpage

Associate Professor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
National University of Singapore

 

 

 

Overview of this page

 

Introduction and Research Areas

I am an Associate Professor in the Communications & Networks (CommNet) Area at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore. 

 

I conduct research in the field of sensor networks and real-time sensor data analytics and machine learning, focusing on the following areas:

Theoretical frameworks and approaches:

 

Owners of Internet of Things (IoT) devices that are between 10 to 20 years old are advised to upgrade from 3G to 4G. See my comments and those of others in this ChannelNewsAsia article on 29 Aug 2023.

 

Our work on Mixture of Experts Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolution Network (MoE-STGCN) for large scale traffic state prediction is featured in a great article and video at the Graphcore UK website. We achieved significant speed-ups using Graphcore Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs).

Read our IEEE VTC 2022 paper that describes this work.

Click here for Chinese version (video has Chinese subtitles).

Click here for Japanese version.

Click here for Korean version.

 

Recent Presentations

·       CK Tham, “Prescriptive Analytics for System Optimization using Deep Reinforcement Learning”, Invited Seminar, College of Information Technology, UAE University, Dubai, UAE, 30 May 2024.

·       CK Tham, “Prescriptive Analytics for System Optimization”, Invited Talk, Dept of Computer Science, Chongqing University, China, Dec 2023.

·       CK Tham, “Industry 5.0 and Prescriptive Analytics”, NUS Cities, Brown Bag lunch talk, 19 May 2023.

·       CK Tham, “From Industry 4.0 to Industry 5.0”, Looking into Industry 5.0 Kaleidoscope, Phoenix Series Season 3, NUS ORMC, 18 Apr 2023.

·       CK Tham, Keynote Speaker on “Internet of Things and AI at the Edge”, Maybank-China Mobile International “Living in the Age of the Internet of Things” event, 27 Sept 2018.

·       CK Tham, “Accelerating Reinforcement Learning in Engineering Systems”, NVIDIA AI Conference 2017, Singapore, 24 Oct 2017.

·       CK Tham, “Edge Analytics on EA-Hubs”, NUS Enterprise “Intelligence at the Edge” Industry event, Singapore, 26 Oct 2017.

 

Recent Courses

·       NEW CK Tham, Course on “Artificial Intelligence & Internet of Things (AIoT) for Industry” for Singapore water industry professionals, Singapore Water Association, 25 & 26 Nov 2024

·       CK Tham, Course on “Internet of Things and Data Analytics for Industry” (long version) for Singapore water industry professionals, Singapore Water Association, Nov 2018; May 2019; 13-15 July 2020; 7-8 July 2021; 25-26 July 2022; 29-30 May 2023

·       CK Tham, Course on “Internet of Things and Data Analytics for Industry” (short version), Temasek Defence Systems Institute, Oct 2019; May 2020.

·       CK Tham, Tutorial on Mobile Cloud Computing and Cloudlets at IEEE CloudCom 2015, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 30 Nov 2015.

 

Research attachments (sabbatical):
University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, Canada (2016)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA (2016)
Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), Shanghai, China (2016)

 

Short Biography

THAM Chen Khong is an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) of the National University of Singapore (NUS). His current research focuses on wireless sensor networks/IoT, machine learning architectures and sensor data analytics involving cyber-physical systems, edge computing and participatory sensing. He was an early proponent of the SensorGrid architecture. He was seconded to A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) Singapore and served as principal scientist and department head of the Networking Protocols Dept, and programme manager of the Personalization, Optimization & Intelligence through Services (POISe) (Services) Programme. He was the programme manager of a multi-institution research programme on UWB-enabled Sentient Computing (UWB-SC) funded by A*STAR Singapore. He obtained his Ph.D.* and M.A. degrees in Electrical and Information Sciences Engineering from the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, and was an Edward Clarence Dyason Universitas21 Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, is in the editorial boards of the International Journal of Network Management and Ad Hoc Networks journal, was the general chair of the IEEE SECON 2014, IEEE AINA 2011 and IEEE APSCC 2009 conferences, and the volunteers chair of IEEE GLOBECOM 2017. He and his co-authors won the Best Paper award at IEEE ICUWB 2008 and ACM MSWiM 2007. Prior to joining NUS, he worked as an IT consultant at Accenture and a quality and reliability engineer at Hewlett-Packard. He recently served as the deputy head for undergraduate studies and student life at ECE NUS and was formerly the chair of the joint academic committee of the NUS computer engineering programme.

 

* PhD thesis: “Modular Online Function Approximation for Scaling up Reinforcement Learning”, University of Cambridge, UK, 1994.

This work is cited in Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto’s classic book Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, 1st (1998) and 2nd (2018) editions.

 

Lecture Courses

I lecture the following graduate and undergraduate courses at NUS:

 

Semester 1
EE4400 Data Engineering & Deep Learning (new in 2022)

(till 2019) EE2028 Microcontroller Programming and Interfacing (see the ECE Connect article (page 3) on an earlier version of the course EE2024 Programming for Computer Interfaces)

 

Semester 2
CEG5103 Wireless and Sensor Networks for IoT / EE5023 Wireless Networks / EE5024 Sensor Networks
EE4802/IE4213 Learning from Data (new in 2021; compulsory module in Minor in Data Engineering)

Funded Research Projects

- Co-PI of project on Predictive Maintenance over Wireless Networks, Cisco-NUS Joint Lab, 2021-2025.

 

Recent Completed funded projects
- Co-PI of 2 projects on Traffic Modelling and Plan Generation using Machine Learning/AI Techniques, ST Engineering-NUS Joint Lab, 2020-2022.
- PI of MOE Tier 1 project: “Distributed Fast Predictive Modelling over Wireless Networks”, 2017-20
- NUS Co-Lead-PI of NRF NUS-Shanghai Jiaotong University CREATE Programme on Energy and Environmental Sustainability Solutions for Megacities (E2S2), Project SP2: “Cloud of Clouds: Peta-scale Urban Sensing and Data Management”, 2012-18.
- PI of MOE Tier 1 project: “System Architecture and Techniques for Event Analytics” (in collaboration with CS, SoC, NUS), 2015-17
- Towards Designing Flexible, Cost Effective and Secured Service Provisioning Strategies for Heterogeneous Data Centers in a Cloud-of Clouds Infrastructure (A*STAR SERC TSRP on Future Data Centre Technologies (FDCT)) (completed in July 2014)
- Event Driven Autonomic Services Architecture with Composition and Event Processing (EDASACEP) (A*STAR SERC TSRP on Data Value Chain as a Service (DVCaaS))
- UWB-enabled Sentient Computing Architecture & Middleware with Coordinated QoS (USCAM-CQ) (A*STAR UWB-SC TSRP)
- Stream Processing for Machine Learning & Control (NUS ARF Grant)

We have developed an Android-based application called ContriSense:Bus that uses participatory sensing to derive useful crowd-sourced real-time information on public buses.

See also our earlier work on SensorGrid.

 

Publications

Click here for details 

 

Technical Conferences

Past Commitments

Volunteers Chair, IEEE GLOBECOM 2017, Singapore, December 2017

General Chair, 11th Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensing, Communications and Networks (IEEE SECON 2014), 30 June-3 July 2014, Singapore.

Organizing Chair, IEEE Singapore International Conference on Communication Systems (ICCS) 2012, Singapore, 21-23 Nov 2012, Singapore.

General Chair of the 25th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA 2011), 22-25 March 2011, Singapore

General Chair, 2009 IEEE Asia Pacific Services Computing Conference 2009 (APSCC 2009)

 

Student Projects

System architectures for machine learning and analytics
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS)
Wireless mesh and sensor networks, Internet of Things (IoT), Edge Computing
Event driven architecture
Participatory sensing
Vehicular sensing

Contact Information

E-mail addresses
   Work: eletck@nus.edu.sg


Web address (this page)
https://www.ece.nus.edu.sg/stfpage/eletck/

Mailing Address
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
National University of Singapore,
4 Engineering Drive 3,
Singapore 117583.

Office Location
Block E4, Level 8, Room 6
Faculty of Engineering
National University of Singapore

Office Phone
(+65) 6516 7959

Office Fax
(+65) 6779 1103
 

Last updated: Aug 2023