Hwee Tou Ng
http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~nght/
Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore
Biography
Dr. Hwee Tou Ng is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore (NUS), a Senior Faculty Member at the NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering, and Director of the Language Mediation Laboratory at the Interactive and Digital Media Institute, NUS. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, USA in 1992. His research spans multiple areas of natural language processing and information retrieval, including word sense disambiguation, coreference resolution, named entity recognition, etc.
He has published papers in premier journals and conferences including Computational Linguistics, ACM Transactions on Information Systems, ACL, EMNLP, SIGIR, AAAI, and IJCAI. In terms of research impact, Dr. Ng is the 40th most cited author in the ACL Anthology Network in 2009 based on incoming citations, and the second most cited author of all authors based in Asia (excluding self-citations). His papers have more than 3,000 citations as tracked by Google Scholar, and his h-index is 25. He received the Best Paper Award at SIGIR 1997.
Dr. Ng has been active in professional services in his research community. He has been serving as the editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing (TALIP) since May 2007, and he is a member of the editorial board of Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) and Natural Language Engineering. He was a member of the editorial board of Computational Linguistics journal in 2004-2006. He is also an elected member of the Executive Committee of the ACL in 2008-2010, and a steering committee member and former secretary of ACL SIGNLL. He was program co-chair of the most important conferences in his field, including EMNLP 2008, ACL 2005, and CoNLL 2004. He has served as an area chair of ACL, EMNLP, and SIGIR conferences and as a session chair and a program committee member of many past conferences including all of the following: ACL, EMNLP, SIGIR, AAAI, and IJCAI.
He currently serves as the Chair of the School Curriculum Committee at the NUS School of Computing. He was program co-chair of the computer science program at the Singapore-MIT Alliance (January 2005 - June 2010). Prior to joining NUS, he worked at DSO National Laboratories, Singapore, where his last position was Lab Head, Informatics Laboratory, and Principal Member of Technical Staff. In 2007, he received the prestigious Singapore Defence Technology Prize (Team R&D Award). He was a recipient of the IBM Graduate Fellowship (1990-1992) and worked as a summer intern at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in 1991.
Statement
I have been an ACL member continuously since 1989, when I was a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. Over the years, I have been actively involved in many professional activities at ACL -- as area chair, program co-chair, tutorial chair, and mentoring service co-chair of the ACL conference, and in the special interest groups including as secretary of ACL SIGNLL and in various capacities in SIGLEX, SIGHAN, and SIGDAT. During the last 2-plus years, I have been serving as a member-at-large of the ACL Executive Committee. Having gained valuable experiences serving in these roles, I believe I am prepared to serve in the position of vice-president-elect and eventually president.
The ACL is healthy and thriving as an organization. The number of submitted papers to its annual conference is steadily growing over the years. I would like to contribute to the continued success of ACL. I am currently serving as co-chair of a subcommittee of the ACL Executive Committee, to explore the possibility of publishing ACL conference papers as journal articles. This initiative aims to combine the advantages of both conference papers (fast publication cycle and conference presentation) and journal articles (rigorous two-round reviewing). If elected and with the support of the ACL membership, I would like to work towards an experimental phase where we actually implement the initiative in a trial.
It used to be that one core benefit of being an ACL member was receiving hardcopy of the Computational Linguistics journal. However, since CL journal became an open access journal, this is no longer the case. I would like to look into what benefits we can offer ACL members, so that we can consolidate and grow the membership of ACL. In regions of the world where there is a significant growth potential, we should more actively engage members from these regions and involve them in the activities of ACL. We should also continue to offer student travel awards to encourage student members to attend ACL conferences and bring in new blood to our field.