On 19 July 2023, the Singapore Chapter of SIGKDD organized a full-day symposium. It was a rich program that among other things featured presentations of papers by authors based in Singapore that had been accepted in recent conferences such as KDD-23, SIGIR-23, ACL-23, IJCAI-23, etc. It was a time for learning as well as networking and fellowship, attracting 70 participants with significant representations from both industry and academia. The event was sponsored by Huawei, as well as SMU School of Computing and Information Systems.
Below is a brief photo-story of the event.
Hady Lauw (SIGKDD Chapter Chair & Associate Professor, Singapore Management University) opened the session by introducing the Singapore ACM SIGKDD Chapter.Rui Zhang (Principal Researcher at Huawei and Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University) discussed the opportunities and challenges of large language model-based information retrieval.Fabian Suchanek (Professor at Télécom Paris University/ Institut Polytechnique de Paris in France) presented a well-received invited talk on ontologies, engaging the attendees throughout and concluding to a rousing round of applause.The afternoon featured a wide-ranging discussion on data science for smart nation, with a diverse panel, featuring (from left) See-Kiong Ng (Professor at NUS), Jing Jiang (Professor at SMU), Jinmiao Chen (Principal Investigator at A*STAR), and Zhongwen Huang (Director of Smart City Projects Office).The programme featured 9 papers as oral presentations, with representations not only from various conferences, but also from the local universities including NUS, NTU, SMU, and SUTD.Another 10 papers were presented as digital posters, projected on a 49″ monitor. In addition, there were 3 posters that were work-in-progress, and we hope that some of them would eventually appear in some future KDD conference.Importantly, our objective was also to gather people for networking and fellowship. In science, as in other endeavours, it’s important not just what you know, but also whom you know, for collaborations and ideas keep flowing.Any gathering in Singapore would not be complete without food. Wow, there was food galore. Some even commented that the food might be better than some conferences where the presented papers were originally accepted.
We’re certainly excited to do this all over again. Keep a look out for our next event!
Singapore ACM SIGKDD Chapter 