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Subra Suresh is President and Distinguished University Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore where he is also a Senior Advisor to Temasek International. He has previously served as: the Dean of MIT’s School of Engineering; Director of the National Science Foundation, a position to which he was nominated by the President of the United States and unanimously confirmed by the US Senate; and President of Carnegie Mellon University. He is an elected member of all three branches of the US National Academies – Engineering, Sciences, and Medicine. He has also been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Inventors and ten other academies based in Europe and Asia, and has been awarded 15 honorary doctorate degrees. He has authored three books, 300 research articles and 25 patents, and has co-founded a technology startup which was acquired in 2006. He has been widely recognized for his research into the properties of engineered and biological materials and their implications for human diseases. His recent honors include: the 2015 Industrial Research Institute Medal; the 2013 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Materials Science; the 2012 Timoshenko Medal and the 2011 Nadai Medal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers; the 2011 Padma Shri award, one of the highest civilian honours from the President of India; and the 2007 Gold Medal of the Federation of European Materials Societies. As Director of the National Science Foundation, Prof Suresh launched the Global Research Council, the Graduate Research Opportunities Worldwide (GROW) program, and the NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program in 2011. The NSF I-Corps program was created by Prof Suresh with the goal of translating research discoveries into industrial practice, which was praised by Harvard Business Review for using “lean start-up techniques to turn scientists into entrepreneurs”. This program has now been replicated by a number of organisations in the US and abroad to assist scientists to become innovators and entrepreneurs. He is an independent Director of the Board of HP Inc. in Palo Alto and a member of the Science, Technology and Innovation Council – created as an advisory body to the CEO and Management Board of Siemens AG, Munich, Germany.

Mr Steve Leonard is a technology-industry leader with a wide range of experience, having played key roles in building several global companies in areas such as Software, Hardware and Services. Although born in the US, Mr Leonard considers himself a member of the larger global community, having lived and worked outside the US for more than 25 years.

In his current role as the Founding Chief Executive Officer of SGInnovate – a private limited company wholly owned by the Singapore Government – Mr Leonard has been chartered to lead an organisation that builds ‘deep-tech’ companies. Capitalising on the science and technology research for which Singapore has gained a global reputation, Mr Leonard’s team works with local and international partners, including universities, venture capitalists, and major corporations to help technical founders imagine, start and scale globally-relevant earlystage technology companies from Singapore.

Prior to his role as the CEO of SGInnovate, Mr Leonard served three years as the Executive Deputy Chairman of the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA), a government statutory board under the purview of Singapore’s Ministry of Communications and Information. In that role, he had executive responsibility at the national level for various aspects of the information technology and telecommunications industries in Singapore.

Mr Leonard serves on the advisory boards of a range of universities and organisations in Singapore. Mr Leonard also serves as an Independent Non-Executive Director at Singapore Post Ltd (SingPost), a global leader in e-commerce logistics; and AsiaSat, a Hong Kong Stock Exchange-listed commercial operator of communication spacecraft.

Professor Chen Tsuhan was appointed Deputy President (Research and Technology) and Distinguished Professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS) on 1 June 2018. Prof Chen is a renowned expert in pattern recognition, computer vision, and machine learning. He is also the Chief Scientist of AI Singapore, a national programme in artificial intelligence hosted at NUS.

Prof Chen joined NUS from the Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, United States, where he has been the David E. Burr Professor of Engineering since 2009. From 2015 to 2017, Prof Chen was the Cheng Tsang Man Chair Professor and Dean of the College of Engineering (CoE) at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. From 2009 to 2013, he served as the Director of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell. During his term as director, Prof Chen promoted the School to top ranking positions, and launched several initiatives to encourage innovation and to promote research and teaching excellence. He also directed the Advanced Multimedia Processing Laboratory, which conducts research in areas including computer vision and pattern recognition; multimedia coding and retrieval; as well as biometric authentication.

A strong supporter and driver of collaborative research, Prof Chen pioneered several support schemes at the NTU CoE to encourage inter-school multidisciplinary programmes aligned with the domain areas identified in RIE2020. These new initiatives included the Advanced Manufacturing and Engineering Centre, the Innovative Centre for Flexible Devices, and the Data Science & Artificial Intelligence Research Centre. Under his leadership, the NTU CoE also sealed partnerships to set up joint laboratories focusing on cyber-physical systems research with Taiwan’s Delta Electronics, and rail transport capabilities with Singapore’s SMRT Corporation.

From 1997 to 2008, Prof Chen was a professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the US. He served as the Associate Department Head from 2007 to 2008. Prof Chen founded and served as Director of the “ITRI Lab @ CMU,” a collaborative research laboratory sponsored by Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). He was also the Director of the International Collaboration on Advanced Security Technology at CyLab CMU, sponsored by Taiwan’s National Science Council.

From 1993 to 1997, Prof Chen was with AT&T Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, New Jersey in the US. He received the MS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, in 1990 and 1993, respectively, and the Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from the National Taiwan University in 1987.

Prof Chen founded the Technical Committee on Multimedia Signal Processing, and the Multimedia Signal Processing Workshop, both in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Signal Processing Society. His endeavour later evolved into the founding of the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia and the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, both joining the efforts of multiple IEEE societies. Prof Chen was appointed the Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Transactions on Multimedia in 2002-2004, championing the growth of the journal in both frequencies and page numbers.

Prof Chen also served on the Editorial Board of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine and as Associate Editor for IEEE Trans. on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, IEEE Trans. on Image Processing, IEEE Trans. on Signal Processing, and IEEE Trans. on Multimedia. He co-edited a book titled Multimedia Systems, Standards, and Networks.

Prof Chen received the Charles Wilts Prize for outstanding independent research in Electrical Engineering leading to a PhD degree at the California Institute of Technology in 1993. He was a recipient of the US National Science Foundation CAREER Award, titled “Multimodal and Multimedia Signal Processing,” from 2000 to 2003. He received the Benjamin Richard Teare Teaching Award in 2006, the Eta Kappa Nu Award for Outstanding Faculty Teaching in 2007, both at the Carnegie Mellon University, and the Michael Tien Teaching Award in 2014 at the Cornell University.

Prof Chen has published more than 300 technical papers and holds 29 US patents. He was elected to the Board of Governors, 2007-2009, and a Distinguished Lecturer, 2007-2008, both with the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He served as Vice President in 2012-2013, and as President in 2013-2014, of the ECE Department Head Association and received the Robert M Janowiak Outstanding Leadership and Service Award in 2017. He is a member of the Phi Tau