Dr. Yew Soon Ong

Dr. Yew Soon Ong

President's Chair Professor Chief AI Scientist, A*STAR
Fellow, IEEE Fellow, Academy of Engineering SG

College of Computing & Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Block N4, 2a-28, Nanyang Avenue 639798

Research Interests

Artificial Intelligence, Computational Intelligence, Statistical Machine Learning, Evolutionary Computation, Optimization, Memetic Computation.

  • Physical AI
  • Safe & Resilient AI
  • Transfer, Multitask & Multiobjective Optimization
  • Bayesian Optimization
  • Combinatorial Optimization
About

Yew-Soon Ong is currently a President's Chair Professor of Computer Science at the College of Computing & Data Science and Professor (Cross Appointment) of the School of Physical and Mathematical Science at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. At the same time, he is Chief Artificial Intelligence (CAS) Scientist of the Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR). He was Chair of the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University between 2016-2019, Director of the Singtel-NTU Cognitive & Artificial Intelligence Joint Lab (SCALE@NTU) since 2017, Director of Data Science and AI Research Centre from 2017 -2020, Director of the Centre for Computational Intelligence/Computational Intelligence Laboratory from 2008-2015 and Programme Principal Investigator of the Data Analytics & Complex System Programme in the Rolls-Royce@NTU Corporate Lab from 2013-2017. He received his Bachelors and Masters degrees from Nanyang Technological University and subsequently his PhD on Artificial Intelligence in Complex Engineering Design from the University of Southampton, United Kingdom. He is a Fellow of IEEE, Fellow of the Singapore national academy of engineering, founding Editor-In-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence, founding Technical Editor-In-Chief of Memetic Computing Journal (Springer), Senior Editor of IEEE Transactions on Neural Network & Learning Systems, Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, and chief co-editor of Book Series on Studies in Adaptation, Learning, and Optimization. He has received five IEEE outstanding paper awards and was listed as a Thomson Reuters highly cited researcher and among the World's Most Influential Scientific Minds. He has published over 200 referred papers at ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, IJCAI, AAAI, CVPR, KDD, WWW, AAMAS and ACM/IEEE Transactions. He is an area chair of NeurIPS, KDD and others.

Some Awards & Honours
  • IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Fellow Evaluation Committee Chair (2023-2025)
  • IEEE Transactions Outstanding Paper Awards (2025, 2023, 2019, 2013, 2012)
  • IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine Outstanding Paper Award (2015)
  • Stanford Elsevier World's Top 2% Scientists (2020-2024)
  • Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher (2015, 2016)
  • 2023 Global MOOC & Online Education Alliance Award
  • Nanyang Education Award (University & College & School)
Teaching
Current Courses
  • SC1303: Programming with Data Structure and Algorithm (Turing AI Scholars Programme)
  • RE1016: Engineering Computation (Renaissance Engineering Programme)
Previous Courses
  • CZ4042-CPE422-CSC422 Artificial Neural Networks
  • CSC207 Software Engineering (Year 2 Core)
  • SC206 Microprocessor Systems Design
  • SC302/CPE302 Computer Networks (Year 3 Core)
  • BI6121 High Performance Computing in Bioinformatics (MSc, Bioinformatics)