Prof. Leong received the B.Sc. (Hon, First Class) degree in Mathematics from the University of Malaya, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 1978 and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the Department of Computer Science, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1986. His PhD research was done under Prof. C. L. Liu who also served the external examiner for our department (then called DISCS) between July 92 to July 96.
From 1978 to 1979 he worked as a tutor at the Department of Mathematics, University of Malaya. He joined the Department of Computer Science of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champiagn as a research assistant in 1979, where he remained as a Visiting Assistant Professor upon graduation in 1985. He joined the National University of Singapore in 1987, where he is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science in the School of Computing.
From 1993 and 1997, he was also the Division Head for Computer Science in the then Department of Information Systems and Computer Science (DISCS). Between 1998 and 2002, he served as Assistant Dean for Special Programmes in the School of Computing, NUS. He was the Curriculum Committeee Chair between 1993 and 1995, a period in which the committee made radical changes to move the curriculum to a modular system and to bring the curriculum close to the ACM Curricula-91 recommendations. The structure of the Modular Curriculum for Computing has remained although it has undergone additional fine-tuning in the years since. Between 1997 and 1999, he was also involved in the MOE Curriculum Review Committee on the new A-level Computing Syllabus for Singapore. He is also an advisor to the Computing Curriculum for Hwa Chong Institution, a premier high school in Singapore.
Prof. Leong has been Chairman of the Singapore IOI Committee from its inaugural year in 1992 till 2004 -- the committee prepares the Singapore team for the International Olympaid on Informatics (IOI). Starting from 1998, he introduced the National Olympiad in Informatics (NOI), the annual programming competition in Singapore. (In 2004, he passed on the Chair of the Singapore IOI Committee to Aaron Tan.) Prof. Leong has also been involved in the Singapore National Software Competition (NSC) in its early years. In December 1999, he was Organizing Chair for the 1999 International Student Software Competition (ISSC-99) that was held Singapore in conjunction with the SEARCC'99 conference. He was also the Organizing Chair and the Chief Judge for the 2000 International Student Software Competition that was held in Manila, Philippines. Prof. Leong is also involved in the organization of the ITSC's code::XtremeApps:: competition, a 24-hour code-jam to produce working web applications using modern, open source programming tools and platforms. From 1994 to 2007, Prof. Leong served on the Executive Council of the Singapore Computer Society (SCS), where he was involved in organizing numerous conferences, including the SEARCC'99 conference in Singapore. Between 2003-2007, he was Chairman of the SCS IT Leaders Award Committee.
His research focuses on the the design and analysis of efficent algorithms for optimization problems from many application areas including VLSI CAD, transportation logistics, multimedia video processing, and most recently, bioinformatics and computational biology. In transportation logistics, he has worked on providing efficient solutions to large-scale resource allocation and scheduling problems. Two software prototype systems were developed -- the BAPS (Berth Allocation Planning System) for container transshipment ports, and RADS (for Route ADvisory System) for land transportation). In particular, RADS, is a fast intelligent bus/MRT search engine for commuters. The RADS system plans travel by bus/subway taking into account various factors such as commuter preferences, walking times and dynamic waiting times at the bus stops. In computational biology, his current interests includes sequencing-by-hybridization, design of optimal synthesis sequence for oligo microarray synthesis, fragment assembly, genome rearrangement, identification of gene clusters, computational analysis of protein-protein networks, and computational proteomics.
Prof. Leong enjoys teaching and working with all kinds of students. He has taught courses in combinatorial and graph algorithms, algorithms, data structures, discrete mathematics, and problem solving in computing. Currently, he also teaches a broad-based introductory course UIT2201 that is entitled "Computer Science and the IT Revolution" for the University Scholar's Programme in NUS. In the mid-90's, he introduced the use of practical examination to evaluate programming ability of the students for introductory programming courses in the School of Computing, NUS. His teaching emphasizes independent thinking and learning, and creative problem solving. In his Assistant Dean portfolio (1998-2002), he looked after many special programmes that are designed to give students added opportunities to explore and develop themselves in areas of research, leadership, problem solving, and broad exposure. Prof. Leong also enjoys giving outreach talks and workshops to young students (in JCs and secondary schools in Singapore and Malaysia) to excite them about computer science and mathematics. Some of these successful workshops are "Problem Solving in Computing", "Creative Problem Solving", "The Tourist Problem and Graph Colouring", and "The Problem of Packing and its many Applications". He has been involved in the Science Research Programme, the GEP Science Mentorship Programme for high school students. He regularly mentors high school students working of mathematics and computer science projects.
Prof. Leong is a member of ACM and IEEE. He has served on the Steering Committee of the IEEE Asia-South-Pacific Design Automation Conference. He has also involved in the organization of several internal conference and workshops -- the 1991 International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS-91), the 1997 International Symposium on Algorithms and Complexity ISAAC-97, the 2002 International Computing and Combinatorics Conference (COCOON-02), the 2006 RECOMB Workshop on Regulatory Genomics (RECOMB-Regulation-06), the 2006 Workshop on BioAlgorithmics (BioAlg-06), the 2007 International Conference on Genome Informatics (GIW-07), and the 2008 International Conference on Research on Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB-08). He is a co-author of the book Simulated Annealing for VLSI Design published by Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Prof. Leong received the Excellent Instructor award from the Department
of Computer Science, UIUC in 1985,
the USP Teaching Award 2008 from the NUS University Scholar's Programme,
the Annual Teaching Excellence Award 2007/8 from NUS.
In July 2009, we won the inaugural Inspiring Mentor Award
given by the NUS Office of Alumni Relations.
In research, Prof. Leong received the
Best Presentation Award in CAD in ICCD-85
and was co-receipient of the
Best Paper Award in VLSI CAD in the APCCAS-92.