Personal Achievements

Undergraduate Graduation Representative, Excellence in Research & Sports

Chosen among 8,733 to meet the President of Singapore and interviewed by a National Newspaper
See certificate

Ironman Langkawi

Completed the extreme triathlon comprising of a 3.8km swim, 180.2km cycle, 42.2km run

2009 World Games Kaohsiung Pre-event

Represented Singapore in the Dragon Boat World Championship Pre-event held in Taiwan

Education

 
 
 
 
 

Doctor of Philosophy in Computational Biology

National University of Singapore Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering

Aug 2008 – Sep 2012 Singapore

 

  • Thesis submitted 22 September 2012
 
 
 
 
 

Bachelor of Computing in Computational Biology

National University of Singapore

Aug 2004 – May 2008 Singapore

 

  • Graduated with Second Class (Upper Division) Honors
 
 
 
 
 

Diploma in Multimedia & Infocomm Technology With Merit

Nanyang Polytechnic Singapore

Jul 1999 – Jun 2002 Singapore

 

  • Graduated second in cohort

Awards

Granted Scholarship for PhD study (approx. SGD 250,000)

Top 2 students in the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program

Top 2nd person in graduating cohort

Most outstanding Final Year Project in graduating cohort

Experience

Work experience (Full-time)

 
 
 
 
 

Software Engineer → Senior Software Engineer → Senior Data Scientist → Data Science Manager

Indeed, Inc.

Aug 2014 – Present Tokyo

 

  • Built full-stack architecture & data science solutions for Recommendation, Spam Detection, and Jobs Discovery, among others
  • Design interview questions and perform both Software Engineering and Data Science interviews with >500 hours of interviewing
 
 
 
 
 

Data Scientist

Rakuten, Inc.

Aug 2013 – Jul 2014 Tokyo

 

  • Optimized Rakuten Ichiba’s Ad platform (such as keyword extraction, paid search ranking logic, optimal ad pricing)
  • Proposed and executed customer acquisition and nurturing strategies/algorithms for Kobo business
 
 
 
 
 

Web Engineer

DeNA Co. Ltd.

Oct 2012 – Jul 2013 Tokyo

 

  • Web engineer in an IT company with the main revenue coming from mobile games
  • Involved in the Mixi-Mobage project and devised the game popularity ranking algorithm

Experience

Work experience (Part-time) and Internship

 
 
 
 
 

Research Analyst

Four Elements Capital Ltd.

Mar 2012 – May 2012 Singapore

 

  • Research Analyst in a Systematic Commodity Hedge Fund
  • Responsible for the collection, data analysis and indicators of the grains industry
 
 
 
 
 

Software Engineer

HedgeSPA Pte. Ltd.

Dec 2011 – Feb 2012 Singapore

 

  • Software Engineer in a Risk Analysis Software Development Firm
  • Back-end performance tuning. Improved runtime of numerous functions by >50%
 
 
 
 
 

Scientific Programmer

Google Summer of Code 2011

Apr 2011 – Aug 2011

 

  • Scientific Programmer for an open source project, BioJava
  • Eventually lead to a scientific publication
 
 
 
 
 

Teaching Assistant

National University of Singapore

Aug 2008 – Dec 2008 Singapore

 

  • Teaching Assistant for “Introduction to Computing” module to non-computing students
  • General consensus of end-semester students’ feedback: A friendly and approachable tutor
 
 
 
 
 

Research Assistant

Kent Ridge Digital Labs (Currently known as I2R)

Oct 2001 – Nov 2001 Singapore

 

  • Research Assistant in the bioinformatics lab of a Research Institute
  • Led to my first publication before I started my undergraduate studies

Publications

Projects

Websites and software I have built

Have you always wanted to invest your money but overwhelmed by the amount of data out and never got started? StocksCafe aims to provide you with actionable information in an easy to digest approach so that you can start investing today!

BioJava is an open-source project dedicated to providing a Java framework for processing biological data. It provides analytical and statistical routines, parsers for common file formats and allows the manipulation of sequences and 3D structures. The goal of the Biojava project is to facilitate rapid application development of bioinformatics and I was a significant contributor of this project.

A Statistical Online Model Checker for Biological Pathway Models, based on the PLTLs formalism for expressing the rules/properties to be checked. MIRACH can currently check pathways models written in popular formats such as CSML or SBML.

Data Assimilation (DA) is a computational approach that estimates unknown parameters in a pathway model using time-course data. Here, we developed a Java software with an intuitive interface to allow users to carry out parameters estimation using DA.

Sirius Prediction System Builder (Sirius PSB) is a software package designed to enable biologists with little or no computing knowledge to carry out sequence analysis using computational methods with ease and speed via a graphical user interface. Built into the software is the ability to build high-quality prediction models, visualization, multi-dimensional protein search, and more.

Talks

Stories

An account of my Ironman story, as told from my wife’s perspective (originally posted on her blog)