Leong Mun Kew

Mun Kew is appointed as Director, Graduate Programmes of ISS. Prior to joining ISS, Mun Kew held multiple positions with the National Library Board, Singapore, as CTO, Deputy CIO & Director CIO Office, and Director, Digital & Knowledge Infrastructure Division. As Deputy CIO, he was responsible for governance and architecture and started ongoing efforts in master data management, enterprise architecture and corporate governance of IT. In particular, he designed a federated approach to EA that allows a gradual easing of operations oriented organizations into a business driven architecture, and started the Government EA Forum to promote practitioner sharing of EA pains and successes.

Before NLB, Mun Kew was Principal Scientist and Programme Director for Services Research at the A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research. In his 20-year research career, his personal research was in information retrieval, digital libraries, distributed multilingual search systems and media semantics, and he also looked after research groups in NLP, security, ontology, data mining and analytics. From 1999 to 2001, Mun Kew was VP and CTO of an IT startup delivering custom distributed deep search technologies and services. He has published and patented in these areas and is an invited speaker in many talks, most recently on cloud computing in government.

Mun Kew received his PhD from Stanford University. He has more than 25 years of R&D and commercial experience in IT. He was Chair and Editor of the ISO/JTC1/WG2/24800 JPSearch international standard, editor or past editor of the Journal of Information Retrieval, Information Processing and Management Journal, member of the advisory board for the School of IIT at Temasek Polytechnic, the IRAL and AIRS symposium series, and formerly Adjunct Assoc. Prof at the National Institute of Education.

Educational Qualifications/Professional Certifications

• PhD, Stanford University
• BSc (High Honours), University of Toronto

Academic and Professional Experience

• 2010 – 2011: Chief Technology Officer / Director, Digital & Knowledge Infrastructure Division, National Library Board, Singapore
• 2008 – 2010: Chief Technology Officer / Deputy Chief Information Officer, National Library Board, Singapore
• 2007 – 2008: Programme Director & Principal Scientist, Services Research, A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research
• 2005 – 2007: Division Director & Principal Scientist, Computing Division, A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research
• 2005 – 2008: Chair, JPSearch AHG & Co-Editor, JPSearch Parts 1 to 5, ISO/IEC/JTC1/W1/24800 (JPEG Search) International Standard
• 2004 – 2007: Adjunct Associate Professor, Learning Sciences and Technology Academic Group, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University
• 2003 – 2005 – Department Manager & Lead Scientist, Media Semantics Department, A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research
• 2001 – 2003 – Research Leader, New Initiatives Program. Concurrently, Head, Planning Group
• 1999 - 2001: Vice-President and Chief Technology Officer, BIGontheNet Pte Ltd. (on secondment)
• 1987 – 1999: Various positions, Institute of Systems Science Research Division/Kent Ridge Digital Labs/Laboratories for Information Technology/ Institute for Infocomm Research (these are all the same entity after several mergers)