HIGHLIGHTS
FACULTY AWARDS & RECOGNITION
| We congratulate the following faculty members on their appointments. | |
| Professor Heng Chye Kiang | Department of Architecture was re-appointed as Provost’s Chair wef 1 April 2023 |
| Professor Balasubramanian Rajasekhar | Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering was appointed as Provost’s Chair wef 1 January 2023 |
| Professor Cecilia Laschi | Department of Mechanical Engineering was appointed as Provost’s Chair wef 1 January 2023 |
| Professor Lee Heow Pueh | Department of Mechanical Engineering was appointed as Provost’s Chair wef 1 January 2023 |
| Professor Chen Zhi Ning | Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering was appointed as Provost’s Chair wef 1 January 2023 |
| Associate Professor Rudi Maria Frans Anne Stouffs | Department of Architecture was re-appointed as Dean’s Chair wef 1 May 2023 |
| Associate Professor Simone Fatichi | Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering was appointed as Dean’s Chair wef 1 January 2023 |
| Associate Professor Yen Ching‐Chiuan | Division of Industrial Design was re-appointed as Dean’s Chair wef 1 May 2023 |
| Associate Professor Kenneth Huang Guang-Lih | Department of Industrial Systems Engineering and Management was appointed as Dean’s Chair wef 1 January 2023 |
| Associate Professor Lee Poh Seng | Department of Mechanical Engineering was appointed as Dean’s Chair wef 1 January 2023 |
| Associate Professor Adam Shaffique | Department of Materials Science and Engineering was appointed as Dean’s Chair wef 1 January 2023 |
Recognising Achievements
More than 70 faculty from the College of Design and Engineering have been recognised for excellence in teaching and research at the CDE Awards and Recognition Ceremony for 2023.
Last month we updated you on the winners of the Teaching Excellence and College Educator Awards.
Our research award winners are spotlighted this month below:
CDE Young Researcher Award 2023
The College of Design and Engineering Researcher Award (CDERA) recognizes faculty who have demonstrated excellence in research and is given out annually. The CDE Young Researcher Award is conferred to researchers 40 years old and below, based on their impact and promise in research.
Outstanding Early Career Award 2023
This award recognizes faculty whose research accomplishments have been outstanding and whose teaching has met the requirement (based on students’ feedback scores) in the early stages of their careers.
CDE Young Researcher Award 2023
Assoc Prof Simone Fatichi
Dept of Civil & Environmental Engineering
One of the major strengths of A/Prof Fatichi is the interdisciplinary approach to Earth System Science, which is often advocated but rarely realized, especially in the knowledge and skills of a single person. A/Prof Simone Fatichi is an emerging world leading scientist with deep understanding of physical and biological processes at the interfaces of hydrology, biogeosciences, and climate. He is at the forefront of research in various disciplines, where he develops new mechanistic models to quantify interactions among different components of the biosphere, hydrosphere, and pedosphere. The breadth and concurrently the depth of A/Prof Fatichi research in the above areas is a singular achievement in today’s science context, which has been recognized with other prestigious international awards.
A/Prof Fatichi and his team developed a novel ecohydrological model, which allowed to enhance the knowledge of global change implications on terrestrial ecosystems, water and soil resources, and the carbon cycle. He also developed a unique tool, an hourly weather generator, which significantly contributed to the understanding of the uncertainties that accompany projections of future climate and their impacts on water resources and rainfall extremes at the local scale. This research brought him at the forefront of scientific methods for dealing with climate change impacts on natural resources and the built environment.
His research has been published in more than hundred scientific articles, most of them in leading journals and it has already made significant impacts – despite the early stage of his career – in the fields of ecohydrology and carbon cycle. A/Prof Fatichi is also a dedicated mentor and teacher, as he advised several PhD students and postdoctoral scientists, most of whom continued to pursue careers in academia.
In summary, the remarkable track record and outstanding scientific achievements reflect on A/Prof Fatichi exceptional approach to deal with complex and interdisciplinary science problems, - that are, absolutely meritful of the CDE Young Researcher Award 2023.
Asst Prof Filip Biljecki
Dept of Architecture
The research of Dr Filip Biljecki and his team in urban analytics and geospatial data science is consistently published in leading journals. His recent research has been focused on characterising the urban form and understanding how to plan better, smarter, and more sustainable cities. In realising this multidisciplinary research agenda, AI and crowdsourcing urban data play an important role. Recent notable outputs of his research include a new method to infer the urban form, and a comprehensive compendium of metrics quantifying the built form in cities around the world, which was established on crowdsourced data and open-source software. The work currently stands as the most detailed and large-scale parametrisation of the individual building stock around the world. Besides publications, his group released several open datasets and open-source software prototypes supporting research in the domain. The excellence of the research has been affirmed by invited talks at universities such as MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, and Stanford, and appointments in editorial boards of top journals. The impact of his research transcends academia, with recognitions also in practice and industry: he has been collaborating with companies, has been appointed as co-chair in the Open Geospatial Consortium, and appointed as chair of a working group in the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing.
Outstanding Early Career Award 2023
Asst Prof He Xiaogang
Dept of Civil & Environmental Engineering
Dr Xiaogang He is a Princeton-trained Ph.D. Hydrologist with experience in economics, machine learning, and environmental policy. His research interests focus on the fundamental understanding of how climate change, variability, and human interventions affect drought and flood risk across scales, and how to implement an integrative framework (e.g., Earth System Models, Integrated Assessment Models, remote sensing, artificial intelligence, multi-benefit spatial optimization, nexus approaches) to reduce their societal impacts on the interlinked water-food-energy sectors.
Dr He publishes extensively in top journals, including one Nature communications and two Science Advances as the lead/corresponding author, one PNAS and one Nature Communications as the co-author. His research has gained substantial media attention, featured by The Straits Times, Channel News Asia, Bloomberg, USA Today, KQED, The Hill, Grist, EurekAlert!, Science Daily, and many others.
Dr He’s Ph.D. research achievement has been recognized by the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) Award for Excellence, which is given to SEAS advanced graduate students who have performed at the highest level as scholars and researchers at Princeton. Most recently, Dr He received the 2020 Editors’ Citation for Excellence Award from the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the 2021 SERB-VAJRA Faculty Award from the Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India.
Dr He has also devoted large efforts to educating next-generation sustainability leaders through the development of new undergraduate modules for the new NUS Cities Program (e.g., Livable Cities; Cities in Nature) and the Second Major in Sustainable Urban Development (e.g., Water-Food-Energy Nexus).
Dr He has served as a reviewer for more than 20 journals, including Nature, Nature Climate Change, Nature Water, Nature Food, Science Advances, Geophysical Research Letters, and Water Resources Research.
Asst Prof Guillaume Adrien Sartoretti
Dept of Mechanical Engineering
Assistant Professor Guillaume Sartoretti joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering (ME) in 2019, where he founded and is directing the Multi-Agent Robotic Motion (MARMot) laboratory. Along with his students and collaborators, Guillaume is at the forefront of decentralized cooperation in robotics multi-agent systems, spanning from large teams of mobile robots or intelligent sensors to individual legged robots composed of many joints. He serves as associate editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (Scopus-Top-10% journal) and for several international conferences. He received best paper awards at DARS 2021 and IEEE ICUS 2022. Guillaume’s recent work on AI-based multi-robot pathfinding, PRIMAL2, was able to coordinate teams of more than 2,000 robots in real-time warehouse automation scenarios, achieving nearly tenfold higher scalability than previous approaches. This earned his team first place for round one of the “Flatland” NeurIPS competition in 2021, and fourth place overall. Building upon these successes, his group has started working on multi-robot search-and-rescue and autonomous exploration with colleagues at T-Lab and DSO, as well as on traffic signal control in partnership with ST Engineering, and more recently Cisco, for improved and more sustainable mobility in the smart cities of tomorrow. He also proposed to approach articulated robots as multi-agent systems, by treating individual joints as separate agents working together towards a common goal such as stable locomotion on rough terrain. This year, Guillaume and several of his ME colleagues embarked on a new project with the Port Authority of Singapore, aimed at automating the lashing of containers on vessels and reduce the physical burden on human workers. At NUS, Guillaume is a dedicated advisor and teacher and is involved in public outreach. He currently advises ten PhD students, of whom more than half have already achieved top-tier publications under his guidance, as well as eight master’s and eight undergraduate students. In collaboration with his ME colleagues, he revamped two existing modules and designed two new ones. He has received very good student feedback that keep improving as he gains more experience and continually reflects on his teaching. Between 2021 and 2022, Guillaume was an invited speaker at the ETHZ Autonomy Seminar series and at an international workshop hosted by IMS at NUS. He was also invited to Amazon Robotics in Boston (USA), to present PRIMAL2, while Channel News Asia featured his work in an episode of their documentary series “Why It Matters.”
Asst Prof Wang Xinchao
Dept of Electrical & Computer Engineering
Assistant Professor Xinchao Wang is a star young researcher in the field of deep learning and computer vision. He is internationally recognized for his work on interpretable and efficient machine learning, such as tracking interacting objects, compressing neural networks and data, reusing pre-trained models, and building explainable network architectures. These technologies serve as the basis for multiple commercial systems adopted by international organizations and leading AI companies, and have been featured by multiple international media outlets.
Since joining NUS in March 2021, Xinchao has secured multi-million research grants from governmental and industry partners. In 2022, his work on deep neural network reassembly, carried out by a team of NUS students and postdoc under his supervision, has been nominated for the best paper award at the top machine learning conference NeurIPS.
Xinchao also received international recognition through his multiple championships in grand international challenges, outstanding editorial services for renowned journals, and the Swiss National Science Foundation Fellowship. Several former students (co-)supervised by Xinchao have now become faculty members in prestigious universities.
A prolific researcher, senior leader, entrepreneur, and mother — Professor Liu Bin from CDE’s Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering was featured in NUS feature on International Day of Women and Girls in Science 2023
Professor Philip Li-Fan Liu from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering was presented the Outstanding Contribution Award for the Oceans 2022. Professor Liu was honoured for his contribution to coastal oceanography and engineering, which promotes construction for tsunami disaster prevention. The National Taiwan Ocean University (NTOU) hosted the awards ceremony on 25 November 2022.
Research fellow Ye Jingwen, supervised by Assistant Professor Wang Xinchao from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, won the Best Paper Award at the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Visual Communications and Image Processing (VCIP). The IEEE VCIP conference has served as a premier forum for exchanging fundamental and applied research in visual communications and image processing.
Professor Massimo Alioto's Green IC group, from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, received the Takuo Sugano Award for Outstanding Far-East Paper at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC 2023). The group received the honour for the paper "Side-Channel Attack Counteraction via Machine Learning-Targeted Power Compensation for Post-Silicon HW Security Patching". The group has made a breakthrough in hardware security technology with sponsorship on their national-level "SOCure" project from the National Research Foundation and Cyber Security Agency of Singapore. The ISSCC is a leading indicator of research and development in advanced solid-state circuits worldwide. It is acknowledged as the"Olympics" in integrated circuit design innovation in academia and the semiconductor industry. The ISSCC Takuo Sugano Award was established to recognise outstanding achievements in semiconductor technology development.
Associate Professor Sanjib Kumar Panda, from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been appointed IEEE Power Electronics Society Distinguished Lecturer for 2023-24.
Prof Seeram Ramakrishna presented with IES award - Staff Awards and Achievements
Prof Seeram Ramakrishna (Mechanical Engineering), FREng, Everest Chair, has been awarded the Institution of Engineers, Singapore (IES) Outstanding Volunteer Award 2022.