Beng Chin OOI

Professor
Department of Computer Science
School of Computing
National University of Singapore
Computing 1, Law Link, Singapore 117590

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

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 some side interest on configurable data centric networking. His current system projects include:

  1. 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
  2. SpADE: a spatio-temporal database engine for managing moving objects. Adaptive B+-tree based indexes and query processing strategies have been designed and incorporated into MySQL, which acts as the database engine. The core techniques are being adopted/extended for supporting MMOG and Virtual World.
  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. PIPA: a database support for interactive media which manages and manipulates audio, video, and image data/streams (an extension of earlier VIPER project).
With the fusion of applications and technologies, the projects are related in many aspects. For example, a system that supports cospace requires various features from the above four projects. 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.

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, and PC Chair for ACM SIGMOD'07. He serves as the Core DB PC chair for VLDB'08, and as an editor of Distributed and Parallel Databases. He was an editor of VLDB Journal, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, International Journal of Geographical Information Systems, and Georinformatca. He is a trustee board member of VLDB Endowment.

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.

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