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Computing don David Lo receives double recognition

Posted on December 22, 2021September 4, 2025 by Teo Chang Ching

Professor David Lo from the School of Computing and Information Systems (SCIS) at the Singapore Management University has been elevated to IEEE Fellow for his contributions to “synergising software engineering and data mining”. This is the highest grade of membership in the IEEE. It is conferred by the Board of Directors upon a person with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. Each year, less than 0.1% of voting members are selected for this member grade elevation. The number of newly elevated IEEE Fellows under age 40 is very rare, and Prof Lo belongs to this youngest category of new IEEE Fellows this year.

IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional organisation dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity.

Prof Lo has also been included among the Fellows of Automated Software Engineering (ASE). ASE Fellows are deemed to “have rendered significant and sustained contributions to the ASE Community, through their scientific accomplishments and their service to the ASE Conferences, ASE Journal, and to the ASE research community in general.”

Professor Lo said, “I am honoured and humbled to receive these recognitions. I would like to thank my PhD advisor, mentors, mentees, and collaborators for their help, support, and contributions, without which these recognitions would not have been possible. I am grateful to SCIS and SMU for providing me with much support in the last 13 years to allow me to grow as a researcher and mentor. These recognitions are a great encouragement for me to continue contributing to the research community, especially to the software engineering and data science fields, as a member of a vibrant group of researchers at SCIS and SMU.”

Prof Lo’s research is at the intersection of software engineering and data science, also known as software analytics, encompassing socio-technical aspects, and analysis of different kinds of software artefacts such as code, execution traces, bug reports, Q&A posts, user feedback, and developer networks, and the interplay between them. He designs data science solutions that transform passive data into tools that improve developer productivity and system quality, and generate new insights.

Prof Lo has published more than 400 papers in refereed conferences and journals. His research work has created impact in a number of ways. Collectively, they have attracted much interest from the research community and inspired many subsequent studies that push the frontiers of knowledge in the areas of software engineering and data science. This is evidenced by the more than 18,000 citations listed on Google Scholar, corresponding to an H-index of 73. In addition, many of his research work are conducted with industry partners, leading to papers presenting state-of-the-art solutions deployed in practice, as well as unique insights into industrial software systems and processes. For example, in a recent paper, Prof Lo and his co-authors presented a state-of-the-art system that is deployed in practice to detect emerging issues of WeChat app by analysing a stream of user feedback.

Additionally, Prof Lo has successfully trained 12 PhD students, who have secured employment at high-tech companies and world-class universities and research institutions across the globe. Prof Lo’s research work has also created collaborations (including many long term ones) between SMU and other universities in over 20 countries, resulting in works published in renowned conferences and/or journals across various areas of computer science research.

Aside from his research work, Prof Lo has also contributed actively to the research community by co-organising conferences and workshops, and serving in the programme boards, programme committees, steering committees, and editorial boards of many top-tier and leading conferences and journals. For example, he served (or is current serving) as the General Chair / Program Co-Chair of 11 international conferences, including the 31st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, which was held at SMU campus in 2016. He is also serving on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Empirical Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Reliability, Automated Software Engineering, Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, Information and Software Technology, Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development, Information Systems, and Neurocomputing.

Earlier this year, Prof Lo was awarded the 2021 IEEE CS TCSE Distinguished Service Award for his “extensive and outstanding service to the software engineering community in his many roles in major software engineering conferences and journals”. He is the first in Singapore and second in Asia to have received this prestigious award.

Prof Lo obtained his Bachelor degree in Computer Engineering from Nanyang Technological University in 2004, and his PhD degree in Computer Science from National University of Singapore in 2008. He joined the School of Information Systems (former name of SCIS) as a Lecturer in May 2008. In April 2020, Prof Lo co-founded the Research Lab for Intelligent Software Engineering (RISE) that conducts research in the intersection of Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, and Cybersecurity with the goal of improving software quality and reducing software cost.

In addition to his current line of research work on software analytics, Prof Lo is keen to solve an emerging problem — how best to adapt software engineering processes and tools that are currently used to design conventional software for AI system development. AI is advancing rapidly and has been, or will be, incorporated into many systems that humans interact with daily, such as self-driving cars. His immediate future goal is to investigate and characterise the limits of current best practices and tools to AI system development, and design novel solutions that address those limitations.

In 2019, Prof Lo was named ACM Distinguished Member for his outstanding scientific contributions to computing. He was among the 62 members worldwide to achieve this recognition in 2019. ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society.

Prof Lo was the recipient of several SMU research awards: the Lee Foundation Fellowship in 2009, the Lee Kong Chian Fellowship in 2018, and the Lee Kuan Yew Fellowship in 2019. He has also received 17 international research and service awards, including 11 best/distinguished paper awards.

SMU maintains prestigious AAHRPP accreditation

Posted on October 20, 2021September 4, 2025 by Teo Chang Ching

The Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs, Inc. (AAHRPP), which promotes high-quality research through an accreditation process that helps organisations worldwide strengthen their human research protection programmes, has announced that Singapore Management University (SMU) has been awarded Full Re-accreditation for five years. SMU was first accredited by AAHRPP in 2018.

SMU remains the only University in Singapore to become an AAHRPP accredited research organisation and the first to be re-accredited. Besides SMU, the only other university-level accredited organisation in Asia (not specific to a medical-related research unit), is Peking University.

Professor Archan Misra, SMU’s Vice Provost (Research) said “Attaining re-accreditation demonstrates AAHRPP’s strong vote of confidence in the high international standards of SMU’s research processes. It also reaffirms that SMU IRB continues to meet all the Accreditation Standards of AAHRPP and our commitment to continuously improve our Human Research Protection Programme to protect the safety, welfare and rights of the individuals who participate in our research, even as research projects evolve to increasingly embrace in-field experimentation and AI technologies.”

In its report on the re-accreditation, AAHRPP noted that SMU has a robust process between the Institutional Review Board (IRB) and the Research Office that allows all grants, contracts, and other proposals being submitted for funding to be sent to and reviewed by the IRB to determine whether human participant research is involved. IRB’s professional support for SMU community members’ human participant research is also addressed. During the past three years, SMU IRB has successfully reviewed and approved 1,389 studies.

The review committee was impressed by SMU’s processes and procedures in protecting the rights and welfare of research participants, and the attention that senior management devoted to balancing the enablement of avant-garde research with the need to protect participants’ rights and the university’s reputation.

To attain re-accreditation, an institution needs to continue to meet all the Accreditation Standards set out by AAHRPP. These include building extensive safeguards into every level of their research operation, and that they adhere to high standards for research.

Examples of the processes and culture that SMU has built into the research operations to protect the safety, welfare, privacy and rights of research participants include the establishment of additional safeguards to protect the vulnerable populations in research, the regular evaluation of SMU Institutional Review Board’s composition and performance to ensure high-quality reviews of human participant research, as well as the inclusion of compliance measures to ensure the proper conduct of transnational research by the SMU researchers.

Research by SMU uncovers ways to help older adults to thrive and grow as the pandemic evolves

Posted on September 23, 2021September 23, 2021 by Valerie Won

A pandemic such as COVID-19 resulted in mandatory social distancing to prevent infection and increased risks of isolation, but Singapore’s older adults have also reported how friends, family and co-workers rallied to help them in these times of need. Many also illustrated how they were resilient in adapting to the pandemic, which is one of the key findings unveiled by the Centre for Research on Successful Ageing (ROSA) of Singapore Management University (SMU) in its report titled, “Growth and Resilience During COVID-19: The Impact of the Pandemic on Older Adults in Singapore”. This report was made possible with the generosity of The Ngee Ann Kongsi.

The report served as a compilation of the research that the centre had conducted on older adult well-being in the past year but also presented new findings from a series of focus groups that the centre had run to learn more about how older adults have coped during the pandemic. The focus groups were conducted with Singapore Life Panel® (SLP) participants aged 56-75 (inclusive) in 2021. A total of 7 focus groups were conducted, with 35 participants in total.

The findings from the focus groups served to contextualise trends that had been observed in previous surveys run by the centre. For instance, the pandemic had led to interruptions in healthcare provision, but older adults previously surveyed remained surprisingly satisfied with their health. The focus groups revealed that many older adults had benefited from the shift to working from home by adopting exercise routines with their free time that improved their health conditions.

In terms of economic well-being, older adults in the SLP did indeed face significant challenges due to losses of income. In the face of such challenges, many older adults were resilient and found innovative ways to overcome these challenges.

Some older adults have opted to adapt to the changes by, for instance, picking up new skills by going for courses or starting online businesses to generate new sources of income

Income support programs should be made available to those who experienced a loss of income so as to improve economic well-being among older adults.

The report also highlights that the pandemic so far has not been all bad for older adults in Singapore

A seemingly perplexing trend that was observed: While the pandemic disrupted the provision of chronic care for older adults who are suffering from chronic ailments, respondents’ satisfaction with health remained constant.

The increase in the work-life balance due to the shift to working from home enabled some older adults to adopt healthier lifestyles and exercise routines, leading to improvements in their health conditions.

This brings attention to a more general point on the need to try to learn from the pandemic in terms of how we can improve older adult well-being even after the pandemic ends.

The findings also indicated the relevance of the social support. Many older adults cited that their friends, co-workers, and family have been important in helping them learn how to adapt to the pandemic, for instance in teaching them how to use communications platforms like Zoom to keep in touch with their friends and family.

Others raised how their children stepped in to do grocery shopping for them during the lockdowns as it was safer for younger people to leave the house.

Interestingly, networks of neighbours were also important for some, as some older adults reported setting up group buy schemes with their neighbours to save on delivery costs.

As Singapore transitions into the new endemic phase, where the country eases COVID curbs, ROSA’s research aims to gain a better understanding of the ‘ageing Singaporean’, and to spotlight ideas to support and improve their well-being. The report thus also highlighted several developments made at ROSA to this end, including the recruitment of a younger sample for the SLP aged 50-55, and the expansion of the scope of study at the centre to include new topics.

Full details of the report can be accessed here.

“As we move into the endemic phase of COVID-19, it is important for us to do a stock-take of what we have learnt from the pandemic so far in order to help older adults transition into this new phase. It is also important to recognise the many ways that older adults have demonstrated resilience in the face of the pandemic. Only in doing so can we adopt the right strategies to proactively enable older adults to not just adapt, but flourish as we move forward,” said Professor Paulin Straughan, Director, ROSA.

The past year has very much been defined by, and for good reason, the COVID-19 pandemic. The unprecedented nature of the crisis and its effect on the well-being of older adults in Singapore made it paramount for ROSA researchers to study it in effort to support policymakers in handling the unanticipated developments that came about as a result.

The ROSA team made significant contributions to this end, and will certainly strive to continue doing so as the pandemic and its effect on our lives continue to persist. That being said, as society adapts to the ‘new normal’ and as Singapore learns to treat COVID-19 as ‘endemic’ rather than a ‘pandemic’, the ROSA team plans to expand the scope of research on the ‘ageing Singaporean’ beyond pandemic related issues.

LSBF Singapore boosts student engagement with its WeChat account

Posted on September 18, 2021September 22, 2021 by Global University Systems

The London School of Business and Finance in Singapore has announced the launch of its official WeChat account.

With over one billion users worldwide, WeChat is China’s largest multi-purpose messaging app. The account has been launched in response to a high number of enquiries for programmes coming from Chinese students.

The WeChat account will provide its followers with full access to different news affecting LSBF Singapore including updates on its programmes, campus location, partnerships, events and student life. Students will also be able to request and enquire directly for further information.

The app will also allow new and current students to engage directly with educational consultants. To start using the platform, students will simply need to scan a QR code already made available to them by the school.

Commenting on this launch, Harry Sun, Head of Sales and Business Development at LSBF, says: “China is a vibrant and dynamic economy and a highly valued market for LSBF Singapore. This felt like the right time to launch this new WeChat service, dedicated to the Chinese market. Through this official account, we hope to connect and serve our Chinese-speaking students in meaningful ways that both educate and inform.”

Rathakrishnan Govind, CEO of LSBF Global, adds: “We are constantly looking to increase interactions and direct engagement with our international students. It is very important for us to make sure they receive first-hand access to any updates that might affect them. It is a priority for us to increase our presence on the different social platforms.”

Singaporean brothers acquire Boston Business School to offer professional training in technology

Posted on August 23, 2021September 3, 2025 by Editorial Team

Boston Business School, a well established and reputable training academy in Singapore, has been acquired by Singaporean brothers Lee Seng Chong, 25, and Lee Kian Chong, 28.

The school has been rebranded BBS to signify a new direction in the curriculum: BBS will offer state-of-the-art, industry-tailored programmes that are designed to train, upskill, or reskill people with digital skills to take on technology roles.

As businesses reengineer their products, service delivery, and processes with technology, they require people with the requisite skills to facilitate that change and to further develop their technology stacks.

BBS will train people with the skills they require to fill those roles. For example, product managers, who increasingly use data to make decisions and problem solve to build and launch products that meet the needs of customers; or cybersecurity engineers to help a company to secure its information.

“There’s an urgent requirement for people to learn new skill sets, which is evident given the number of unfilled jobs in the cybersecurity, or ICT sectors(3), but skills shortages span most industries,” says Mr Lee Seng Chong, Executive Director of BBS.

“With BBS, we are working closely with a range of industry partners to develop programmes that are designed to train, upskill, or reskill, people to work in such roles.”

A recent vendor survey found that unless people are trained, the number of unfilled roles could multiply by at least five and half times over the course of the next five years.

BBS will launch its first newly developed programmes later this year and aim to equip people to work in the cybersecurity sector.

SMU computing dons receive global recognition for outstanding contributions in software engineering and artificial intelligence

Posted on July 4, 2021September 3, 2025 by Teo Chang Ching

Professor David Lo and Associate Professor Akshat Kumar from the School of Computing and Information Systems (SCIS) have been recognised for their outstanding contributions and accomplishments in the fields of software engineering and artificial intelligence respectively.

Professor David Lo has been awarded the 2021 IEEE CS TCSE Distinguished Service Award for his extensive and outstanding service to the software engineering community in his many roles in major software engineering conferences and journals. He is the first in Singapore and second in Asia to have received this prestigious award.

The IEEE Computer Society is the world’s largest professional organisation devoted to computer science, and the Technical Council on Software Engineering (TCSE) is the voice of software engineering within the IEEE and the Computer Society. TCSE aims to advance awareness of software engineering and to support education and training through conferences, workshops, and other professional activities that contribute to the growth and enrichment of software engineering academics and professionals.

Associate Professor Akshat Kumar has been named a Senior Member of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). He is among the nine worldwide to achieve this recognition, and the only academic in Singapore and Asia to be named among the 2021 Honourees.

Senior Member status is designed to recognise AAAI members who have achieved significant accomplishments within the field of artificial intelligence. To be eligible for nomination for Senior Member, candidates must be consecutive members of AAAI for at least five years and have been active in the professional arena for at least ten years.

AAAI is a scientific society devoted to advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behaviour and their embodiment in machines. It aims to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence.

Professor Lo said, “I am honoured and humbled to receive the 2021 IEEE CS TCSE Distinguished Service Award. I would like to thank the hundreds of colleagues whom I have worked with in conference and journal organizations and to SCIS and SMU for their support. It has been a fun and rewarding journey to work together with many wonderful colleagues in SCIS, SMU, Singapore, and from across the globe to co-organize more than 30 international conferences. I especially fondly remember the conferences that were held at the SMU campus. Thank you very much SCIS and SMU for supporting these events!”

Prof Lo has published more than 400 papers in refereed conferences and journals. His research work has created impact in several ways. Collectively, they have attracted much interest from the research community and inspired many subsequent studies that push the frontiers of knowledge in the areas of software engineering and data science. This is evidenced by the more than 16,000 citations listed on Google Scholar, corresponding to an H-index of 71.

Associate Professor Akshat Kumar said, “I am greatly honoured to be selected as a Senior Member of AAAI. I am fortunate enough to have great mentors, students, and collaborators over the course of my career, and an intellectually stimulating work environment at SMU’s School of Computing and Information Systems. I am very thankful for their continued support and collaboration which are invaluable for my research and academic career.”

Prof Kumar’s research is in the area of planning and decision making under uncertainty with a focus on multiagent systems and urban system optimisation. His work addresses our rapidly interconnected society and urban environments, from personal digital assistants to self-driving taxi fleets and autonomous ships, and develops computational techniques that will allow such complex ecosystem of autonomous agents to operate in a coordinated fashion. Over the past few years, Prof Kumar’s work has addressed various challenges in such diverse urban settings as scalability to thousands of agents, uncertainty and partial observability, and resource-constrained optimisation.

In addition to academic contributions, Prof Kumar also participated in the Fujitsu-SMU Urban Computing and Engineering Corporate Lab from 2014-2019. He along with his collaborators have designed maritime simulators and novel intelligent scheduling algorithms that can coordinate vessel traffic in Singapore Straits for better safety of navigation. Such simulators and approaches are based on studying the real location data for ships that enter Singapore waters over a large period of time. Results of such studies have appeared in leading AI conferences.

Prior to joining the School of Information Systems (former name of SCIS) in 2014, Prof Kumar was a research scientist at the IBM research lab in New Delhi. He obtained his Bachelor degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India, and his Masters and PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, all in computer science.

Over his decade long career in AI, Prof Kumar has published more than 40 papers in
refereed conferences and journals.

Prof Kumar’s work has received numerous awards including the Best Dissertation Award at the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2014), and a runner-up award at International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2013). His work has also received the Outstanding Application Paper Award at ICAPS 2014, and the Best Paper Award in the 2017 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence in the computational sustainability track. All these conferences are among the top-tier conferences in the field of AI.

At SMU, he has been awarded the Lee Kong Chian Fellowship in 2017 for his sustained research contributions at SMU. On his future research, Prof Kumar sees multiagent systems becoming more and more relevant with the adoption of internet-of-things. He is particularly excited by several research challenges which arise with such unprecedented connectivity, such as dealing with the problem of scale, ensuring safe co-habitation of humans and autonomous agents, and ensuring coordination in the presence of both cooperating and competing agents.

SMU earns AACSB accreditation for its business and accountancy programmes

Posted on May 20, 2021May 20, 2021 by corinnekang

SMU’s Lee Kong Chian School of Business (LKCSB) and School of Accountancy (SoA) have both earned reaccreditation from AACSB International (AACSB), the largest business education network and longest-serving global accrediting body for business schools.

SMU is one of seven universities in Asia that have earned the AACSB accreditation in both business and accounting. It was also one of the youngest schools globally to have achieved this dual accreditation.

Professor Gerard George, Dean of SMU LKCSB, said, “I am extremely proud that we have successfully achieved re-accreditation under AACSB’s new standards. LKCSB has been successful at achieving Top 50 global rankings for our thought leadership and our programmes. The re-accreditation demonstrates AACSB’s confidence in the excellent quality of our undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, research impact, and our deep engagement with industry partners.”

“AACSB accreditation is synonymous with high international standards of quality and reaffirms the strong value proposition that we offer to all our students.”

Professor Cheng Qiang, Dean of the SMU SoA, said, “Maintaining the AACSB International accreditation since 2011 is a testament to our university’s and school’s commitment to delivering innovative, engaging and impactful programmes. I am proud to share that the review team was impressed with the integration of data analytics and technologies in our Bachelor of Accountancy (BAcc) and masters programmes to prepare students for the digital future, as well as our strong internship and employment outcomes.”

“I would like to take this opportunity to thank all our faculty and staff for their dedication to the School and for ensuring that SMU is offering accounting education at the highest level of quality.”

Including SMU, there are over 890 business schools in 58 countries and territories that have earned AACSB Accreditation in business and 189 institutions that hold a supplemental, specialised AACSB Accreditation for their accounting programmes.