Assistant Professor Hady Lauw from the SMU School of Information Systems (SIS) has been recognised for his research progress to date and high future potential with the award of the prestigious Singapore National Research Foundation (NRF) Fellowship. He is the first SMU faculty member to receive the award.

Prof Lauw has received a research grant from NRF to undertake a five-year research on data mining and machine learning, with a focus on dimensionality reduction technologies for recommender systems.  His major research goal is to study algorithms for learning the preferences of consumers from large-scale data of diverse formats and types, to enable more accurate personalization for e-commerce applications. These technologies are expected to enhance consumer experiences through relevant simplification and customization of choices in a digital shopfront, providing a personal touch to each individual consumer based on her likes or dislikes.  Making it easier and faster for consumers to find what they are looking for will also drive greater engagement, and sales, for businesses in the extremely competitive e-commerce marketplace.

Prof Hady said, “I am delighted to be an NRF fellow and grateful for this significant award, which allows me to take a longer-term view of research. Together with SMU’s conducive research environment, this presents an excellent opportunity for me to contribute to the development of personalization and recommendation technologies, and address important questions in data mining and machine learning.”

The NRF Fellowship seeks to support early-stage career researchers, with the objective of providing opportunities for promising young talent to lead their first independent potentially ground-breaking research in Singapore. It is open to all areas of science and technology.

Applicants go through a two-step selection process, comprising a shortlisting process and a final selection. Shortlisted candidates are then invited for a final interview by the NRF Fellowship Evaluation Panel.

Prior to joining SMU in 2012, Prof Lauw was a Scientist with A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research, and a Postdoctoral Researcher with Microsoft Research in USA.

His current research interests include preference mining and recommender system, visual analytics and dimensionality reduction, and web search and mining.  In kickstarting the NRF Fellowship project, he is actively researching how preferences may manifest in user behaviors and textual content, and how they may be influenced by social contexts.

Prof Lauw has filed two patents, one has already been granted while the other is pending. He has also published more than forty-five papers in refereed conferences and journals, some of which have won recognitions including a nomination for the best paper award at the prestigious AAAI-14 conference as well as a publication on the Award Winning Papers Track of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. He is a recipient of A*STAR Graduate Scholarship and Dr. Goh Keng Swee Scholarship.

Prof Lauw's interview by The Straits Times was published on 13 May 2016. Please refer to pdf file below.