TECH EXPERTS

Yue Keng Mun is currently Head of Aviation Research Centre in Temasek Polytechnic, leading applied research in unmanned aircraft, aerospace maintenance, repair and overhaul, and airport systems. He has 29 years of extensive experience in mechanical engineering design, system integration, product development and prototyping. In addition to his technical expertise, he has held management appointments such as being the course chair of the Diplomas in Aerospace Engineering and Mechatronics. He also holds a rotorcraft unmanned aircraft pilot licence (UAPL) and three patents. He enjoys working on innovation projects and competitions where often, simple ideas can solve complex problems. His prior work experience was in ST Engineering as a design engineer in the development and integration of land systems vehicles.

Dr. Liu Shubin has worked on process and operation optimization for more than 15 years. He is a senior lecturer in Republic Polytechnic (RP) and he provides consulting service to various industry sectors across transportation, warehousing and manufacturing. Currently Dr. Liu is focusing on promoting Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technology to enable non-IT people to reduce their own daily repetitive tasks. He was recognized by the lead RPA vendor UiPath as one of the Most Valuable Professionals (MVP) in both 2020 and 2021. In 2021, Dr Liu implemented a delivery route planning system for one Singapore food delivery service company. The system not only reduces 20% of drivers' traveling time on the road but also provides accurate food Expected Time Arrival to customers. Dr. Liu was awarded Translational and Innovation Research Fund by Singapore Ministry of Education for research project “Dynamic Vehicle Routing and Dispatching System for City Logistics”. The planning system, “EasiPlanner”, was adopted by three polytechnics in Singapore for teaching purpose and was also adopted by logistics companies in Singapore for daily delivery planning. Recently he completed a project, “Dial-A-Ride Routing and Scheduling for Wheelchair Users”, which was funded by Singapore TOTE Board. Currently the solution is commercialisation ready for transportatoin companies to implement vehicle resource pooling for both passenger and cargo transportation. Before joining Republic Polytechnic, Dr. Liu was in charge of development and implementation of wafer fabrication automatic scheduling system in Micron Semiconductor. Dr. Liu Shubin obtained his Ph.D. from the National University of Singapore.

Khim Yong is a Senior Lecturer with the Digital Fabrication and Additive Manufacturing Centre at Temasek Polytechnic.  Prior to his teaching career, he worked as a Mechanical Engineer in Singapore Technologies Kinetics in helping to optimize some of the existing platform designs for reliability.  His skill sets are in computer-aided design (CAD), mechanical design and rapid prototyping, which includes 3D metal printing.  In the 6th Singapore International 3D Printing Competitions organized by Singapore Centre for 3D Printing (SC3DP), Khim Yong was in-charge of supervising project students in the design and additive manufacturing process of their entry ‘Ergo Walker’.  The ‘Ergo Walker’ project which was an innovative transport solution for the elderly, won the top prize in the Singapore Tertiary Student Category. Currently, he is involved in system design for defense training aid using additive manufacturing. 

Dr Hamid Saeedipour is Principal Lecturer (Industry) at Republic Polytechnic. With more than 25 years of experience in the aircraft industry and academia, Hamid is an expert in the area of aerospace and mechanical engineering design, smart MRO systems and composite structure repair. He also provides innovative engineering solutions to industry and is currently principal investigator of several industry-application projects.  Prior to joining Republic Polytechnic, Hamid held various roles, including associate dean, deputy director, aircraft designer and lecturer, with organisations in UK, Iran, Malaysia and Singapore such as Avcen Limited, University of Science Malaysia, and Taylor’s University. He has also been Adjunct Faculty/Supervisor for Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT), Newcastle University and University of Glasgow in Singapore since 2012. Hamid received the Most Innovative Project Award from JEC Group (France) in 2015, was conferred the Crescendas Medal for Outstanding Applied Physics Research from Institute of Physics Singapore (IPS) in 2017, MOE Outstanding Innovator Award 2018 and PST ExCEL Innovation Champion Award 2018. He wrote chapters of 2 books and profiled in IES book (2020): “Who’s Who in Engineering, Singapore”. Hamid received his PhD & MSc in Aerospace Engineering from Manchester University, BEng (1st Class Honors) in Mechanical Engineering from Tehran University and MBS Post-Graduate Certificates in International Business and Finance from Manchester Business School. Hamid has over 100 publications in aircraft design, composite repair, MRO systems, aviation management & engineering education. He supervised final projects of over 20 PhD/MSc, 80 BSc & 140 diploma graduates at 9 universities & polytechnics.

Dr Danica Damljanovic is an entrepreneur, and an Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) expert with over 16 years experience in AI and NLP, and over 5 years in entrepreneurship, and has worked with the SRI team that developed Siri, and in Recordsure analysing human-to-human conversations. As an internationally recognised scientist Danica has published more than 50 publications, and a book on text analytics, cited over 1600 times. Danica is a founder and CEO of Sentient Machines, that is on the mission to improve human communication using AI - Danica's belief is that AI, used to positively assist humans, is stronger than AI or humans working independently. Utilising AI to empower people to both learn faster and enhance their lives meaningfully is Danica's passion. Danica received her PhD in AI on the topic of Natural Language Interfaces for Querying Ontologies from the University of Sheffield in 2011. It was here that Danica developed the FREyA system which was scored as the best question answering system against the DBpedia knowledge base (structured Wikipedia) in the QALD-1 Challenge 2011. Her interests have always been transitioning cutting edge research methods into practical applications.  Danica started her career as a software engineer, and has, in parallel, researched various areas of AI, mainly focusing on NLP, dialogue systems, topic detection, semantic web, ontologies, question answering systems, and conversational agents.

Dr Mabel Wang has more than 20 years of R&D experience in food science & technology, gaining substantive academic and industry expertise in functional food product and process development. She published approximately 10 peer-reviewed international scientific journals and book chapters. Having worked in food & beverage companies like ADM Cocoa and Yeo Hiap Seng (YHS), her R&D expertise is proven by many successfully commercialised products, which range from healthier Asian drinks, calcium-fortified soymilk and industry chocolates for Singapore, China, Asia Pacific countries, Europe, Middle East, Canada and USA markets, etc. She set up an in-vitro glycemic index (GI) assessment facility in Temasek Polytechnic in 2013. As Domain Chair (Food Technology), she led a R&D team to develop functional food products, especially low GI food products (e.g., noodles, breads, steamed buns and beverages), and conducted sensory evaluation and shelf life study projects for food industry. Having worked closely with local food SMEs, she was recognised and appointed by Enterprise Singapore (ESG) as SkillsFuture Mentor from Nov 2018 to July 2019. 

Dr Sun LingLing heads the Healthcare Engineering Centre at the School of Engineering in Temasek Polytechnic. She leads a multi-disciplinary R&D team on developing innovative healthcare devices; such as microfluidic and biosensor based point-of-care systems for disease diagnosis, flexible and wearable sensors for healthcare monitoring, and novel devices and materials for antimicrobial applications. As a Principle Investigator, Dr Sun has been awarded numerous R&D funds by National Research Foundation, Ministry of Education and Tote Board, and has completed more than 10 R&D projects together with the team since 2012. Under her leadership, the team has been awarded IES Prestigious Engineering Achievement Awards 2016, MOE-Innergy Award (Silver) 2017, MOE-Innergy Award (Gold) 2018, and MOE-Innergy Award (Bronze) 2019. Dr Sun received her PhD in Microelectronics from Nanyang Technological University in 2003. Prior to joining Temasek Polytechnic, she worked as a senior engineer at System on Silicon Manufacturing Company and a research fellow at Nanyang Technological University.

Howard is the cofounder of Enverse, a data analytics company focusing on providing actionable insights for the energy and manufacturing industry. As the cofounder of a startup, Howard is actively involved activities relating to customer development, product development, and software engineering. He has experience in evaluating the business problem of the client and customise a best-fit and applicable engineering solution to meet their needs. He has 10 years of experience in the energy, software automation, system integration, and data analytics space. Throughout the 10 years of his career in the energy sector, he has worked in the entire energy supply chain from the business perspective, and the energy delivery from the engineering perspective. He has experience building technologies to support projects for power generation, power distribution, and power consumption. Coming from a system integrator background, he is capable of advising customers on end-to-end system architecture from conceptual level to engineering level. 

A/Prof Daniel Blackwood has more than 30 years of experience in corrosion and electrochemistry research and development. His current research focus areas include localised pitting corrosion, corrosion modelling and microbial-influenced corrosion. He is currently Associate Professor and Deputy Head for Education in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering, National University of Singapore, where he has been since 1996. A/Prof Blackwood obtained his PhD degree in Electrochemistry under Prof Laurie Peter at University of Southampton in 1986. He was a postdoc at University of Utah where he worked on developing FTIR techniques for exploring the electrochemical interface. In 1989, he received an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship to work at Bundeswehr University Munich on conducting polymer vapour sensors. In 1990, he joined the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority at Harwell Laboratories as a project manager in the aqueous corrosion section, where he worked on a number of industrial projects for both government agencies and commercial companies. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and a member of the National Association of Corrosion Engineers and the International Society of Electrochemist. He was also Chairman of the Corrosion Association Singapore from 2000 to 2009.