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, Dean of School of Computing (SoC), and Director of Interactive Digital Media Institute (IDMI) 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.

Beng Chin's research interests include database system architectures, performance issues, indexing techniques and query processing, in the context of multimedia, spatio-temporal, distributed, parallel, P2P, and Cloud database systems and applications. His ongoing 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)[VLDB2005, SIGMOD2006] 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[ICDE1994], ST B-tree[DKE1995], iMinMax[PODS2000], iDistance[VLDB2001, TODS2005], B^x-tree[VLDB2004], GiMP[TODS2005], ST^2B-tree[SIGMOD2008, TODS2010], B^{ed}-tree[SIGMOD2010]).

Beng Chin has served as a PC member for international conferences such as ACM SIGMOD, VLDB, IEEE ICDE, WWW, and SIGKDD, and as 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 serves as a PC Chair for IEEE ICDE'12. He was an editor of VLDB Journal and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, and as a co-chair of the ACM SIGMOD Jim Gray Best Thesis Award committee. He is serving as the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE)(2009-2012), an editor of Distributed and Parallel Databases Journal, an advisory board member of SIGMOD, and a trustee board member and executive of VLDB Endowment. He is the recipient of ACM SIGMOD 2009 Contributions award, a co-winner of the 2011 Singapore President's Science Award, and the recipient of 2012 IEEE Computer Society Kanai award. He is an ACM and IEEE Fellow.

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