Beng Chin OOI

Professor
Department of Computer Science
School of Computing
National University of Singapore
Computing 1, Computing Drive, Singapore 117417

ooibc AT comp.nus.edu.sg
Tel: +65-6516 4782/6465
Office: COM1, #03-54/46

2008may
Beng Chin is Professor of Computer Science and Dean of School of Computing, at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He obtained his BSc (1st Class Honors) and PhD from Monash University, Australia, in 1985 and 1989 respectively. He joined Institute of Systems Science (ancestor of I2R) in 1989, and transferred to NUS in 1991, and has been a full professor since 2000.

Beng Chin's research interests include database performance issues, indexing techniques, multimedia and spatio-temporal databases, P2P systems and advanced applications, and cloud computing. His current system projects include:

  1. epiC: an Elastic, Power-aware, data-Intensive Cloud platform. The objectives are to design and implement an efficient multi-tenancy cloud system for supporting high throughout low latency transactions and high performance reliable query processing.
  2. Co-Space: A storage and query processing engine for supporting cyber-physical World. The system is being designed to support cross-domain relationships between objects.
  3. UTab: Universal TABle storage system for managing data on small devices, p2p nodes and community web management systems (CWMS), where we intend to offer fast and layman-proof insertion of tuples into generic tables, efficient indexing, semantics resolving and efficient query processing.
  4. BestPeer 2.0: a peer-to-peer based data management system which supports both structured (BATON) and unstructured with supernodes overlays. It is a one-platform multi-structures p2p network that is able to support expansion-based routing in unstructured setting, and DHT-based exact and range-based routing in structured setting. It supports keyword, similarity and attribute based query retrieval. It is designed to provide enterprise-quality data processing capability in corporate networks. It uses JIT and approximate indexing to reduce maintenance cost. The system is built in lego block manner, and each main concept/component is tested on PlanetLab before it is incorporated into BestPeer. Related projects: S3(BestPeer 2.0), and BestPeer Pte Ltd
With the fusion of applications and technologies, the projects are related in many aspects. For examples, a system that supports cospace requires various features from the above four projects, and so does a travellog system - MarcoPolo. Beng Chin approaches research problems and system design with the philosophy that all algorithms and structures should be simple, elegant and yet efficient so that they can be easily grafted into existing systems and they are implementable, maintenable and scalable in actual applications. A good example would be his approach towards the design of new indexes; they are mainly B+-tree based -- simple and elegant in design, and efficient, robust and scalable in performance (eg. TP-index[1994], ST B-tree[1995], iMinMax[2000], iDistance[2001], B^x-tree[2004], GiMP[2005], ST^2B-tree[2008], B^{ed}-tree[2010]).

He has served as a PC member for international conferences including ACM SIGMOD, VLDB, IEEE ICDE, WWW, SIGKDD and Vice PC Chair for ICDE'00,04,06, co-PC Chair for SSD'93 and DASFAA'05, PC Chair for ACM SIGMOD'07, and Core DB PC chair for VLDB'08. He was an editor of VLDB Journal, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, International Journal of Geographical Information Systems, and Georinformatca. He serves as a co-chair of the ACM SIGMOD Jim Gray Best Thesis Award committee, Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), an editor of Distributed and Parallel Databases Journal, and a trustee board member of VLDB Endowment. He is the recipient of ACM SIGMOD 2009 Contributions award.

He is a founder of Thothe Technologies (1999), a company providing imaging and digital asset management solutions, and the founder of BestPeer(2007), a company providing enterprise quality data processing over P2P corporate networks and P2P data streaming solutions.

He is a fellow of IEEE and a member of ACM.

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