Limsoon Wong
Deputy Executive Director (Research)
I 2 R: Imagination to reality

I 2 R Knowledge Discovery Dept:
INTRODUCTION

I 2 R
BMRC SERC
IMRE
IHPC
ICES
SIMTECH
IME
DSI
• mission:
Advance Infocomm
Technology to benefit humanity and create prosperity for S’pore
• core values:
Dedication to excellence, passion for innovation, integrity & respect
• size:
350 RSEs

Organization
I 2 R
Services & Applications Communications & Devices Media
Infocomm
Security
• Cryptography
• Network security
• Information security
Knowledge
Discovery
• Knowledge
Extraction
• Decision Systems
• Discovery
Systems
E-Service
Infrastructure
• Service
Composition
• Service creation
• Data-in-Network
• Connected Home
• Secure Filesystem/
DBMS
Media
Processing
• Mutimedia Signal
Processing
• Noise Reduction
Media
Semantics
• Media Adaptation
• Mixed Media Mining
• Natural Language
Synergy
• Pervasive Media
Human Computer
Interaction
• Perceptual Human
Media
• Speech & Dialogue
• Biometrics
Embedded
Systems
• Terminal
• Software Defined
Radio
Radio Systems
• Transceiver system
• Antenna
• Radio Over Fiber
• UWB
Networking Digital Wireless
• Next Gen IP
• End-to-end QoS
• Mobile Middleware
• Mobile Adhoc Networks
• Mobile Sensor Networks
• Modem Technology
• Multiple Access
• Smart Antenna Array
Systems
Lightwave
• Network Design
• WDM Systems
• Fibre Technology

History
8 years of bioinformatics
R&D in
Singapore
Integration
Technology
(Kleisli)
MHC-Peptide
Binding
(PREDICT)
Cleansing &
Warehousing
(FIMM)
Protein Interactions
Extraction (PIES)
Molecular
Connections
Gene Expression
& Medical Record
Datamining (PCL)
Gene Feature
Recognition (Dragon)
GeneticXchange
1994
ISS
1996 1998
KRDL
Venom
Informatics
2000
Biobase
2002
LIT/I 2 R

Direction & Plan
• Objectives
– Translate inspiration from biological systems into advancement of life and computing sciences
– Advance data mining technologies in decision systems for complex problems
• To work on practical systems for
– data mining
– data cleansing
– knowledge extraction
• Applied to
– gene regulation
– protein interaction
– clinical data analysis
– ligand-receptor interaction in addition to non-bio areas

I 2 R Knowledge Discovery Dept:
RECENT ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Predict Epitopes,
Find Vaccine Targets
• Vaccines are often the only solution for viral diseases
• Finding & developing effective vaccine targets
(epitopes) is slow and expensive process
• Develop systems to recognize protein peptides that bind
MHC molecules
• Develop systems to recognize hot spots in viral antigens

Recognize Functional Sites,
Help Scientists
• Effective recognition of initiation, control, and termination of biological processes is crucial to speeding up and focusing scientific experiments
• Data mining of bio seqs to find rules for recognizing & understanding functional sites
Dragon’s 10x reduction of
TSS recognition false positives

Diagnose Leukaemia,
Benefit Children
• Childhood leukaemia is a heterogeneous disease
• Treatment is based on subtype
• 3 different tests and 4 different experts are needed for diagnosis

Curable in USA,
 fatal in Indonesia
Cancer Cell , 1:133-143, 2002
• A single platform diagnosis based on gene expression
• Data mining to discover rules that are easy for doctors to understand

Understand Proteins,
Fight Diseases
• Understanding function and role of protein needs organised info on interaction pathways
• Such info are often reported in scientific paper but are seldom found in structured databases
• Knowledge extraction system to process free text
• extract protein names
• extract interactions

Recent Collaborations/Partners
• Molecular Connections, India
• RIKEN, Japan
• St Jude, USA
FANTOM2 Consortium
Nature 420, 563-573, 2002
• BioBase, Germany
• Canberra Hosp., Australia
• GIS, Singapore

I 2 R Knowledge Discovery Dept:
PEOPLE

Who will you be working with...
Heads of labs
Jinyan Li
Other PIs
Vladimir Bajic
Limsoon Wong
• 18 full-time staff comprising
9 PhD, 6MSc, and 3BSc
• Our faculty holds adjunct professorial positions in
SANBI, Univ. of Canberra,
NUS, and NTU
See-Kiong Ng
Vladimir Brusic

Track Record
•
•
Journals:
3 chief editorial roles, and 9 editorial board memberships
International Conferences (last 5 years):
4 conference chairs, and more than 40 program committee roles, 10 keynote lectures, and dozens of plenary talks
•
•
•
Publications (last 5 years):
More than
100 in last 5 years, mostly in reputable journals (e.g. Nature,
PNAS, Cancer Cell,
JACM) and top conferences.
Patents (last 5 years):
1 granted and
6 pending
Commercialization (last 5 years):
2 international start-ups and one software licensed