Beng Chin is Professor and Dean of the School of Computing, National University Singapore. He has previously held various administrative positions, including Sub-Dean (Science), Deputy Head (CS), Strategic Planning Committee Chair (CS), Vice Dean(SoC) and Deputy Director at the University Computer Centre.
Beng Chin obtained his BSc (1st Class Honors) and PhD from Monash University, Australia, in 1985 and 1989 respectively. His early research work (1985-1988) focuses mainly on the design and implementation of geographical information systems. He was the main architect of GEOQL, through which he made many original contributions in spatial indexing (e.g., the SKD-tree), optimization strategies, and extensible storage management. While at the Institute of System Science (1989-1991), he led a team in the implementation of a database backend for object-oriented systems. His accomplishments include the invention of efficient indexes for object-oriented databases (the H-tree), strategies for extensible buffer management, as well as the design and implementation of an extensible storage manager. In 1991-1994, he developed a user-interface management system -- called DUET -- for rapid development of database applications. From 1994 to 1999, he worked on VIPER project -- a content-based multimedia retrieval system which facilitates efficient retrieval based on freetext as well as color and texture of images (which has evolved into his current work on PiPA ). From 1998 to 2000, he participated in GAtlas -- a global WWW search engine based on spatial and semi-structured information. His recent works include BestPeer(1999--) -- a self configurable peer-to-peer platform for distributed object management; SpADE(2003--) -- a spatial autonomic database engine for supporting location based services; UTab(2005--) -- a universal table inspired storage system for supporting community databases and PIPA (2005--) -- a database engine for supporting interactive media.
Beng Chin is the author of a monograph entitled "Efficient Query Processing in Geographical Information Systems," (Springer-Verlag: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1991), and a co-author of "Indexing Techniques for Advanced Database Systems," (Kluwer, 1997) and "Data Dissemination in Wireless Computing Environments," (Kluwer 2000). He has also published over 90 papers in top international conferences including SIGMOD, VLDB and ICDE and international journals such as ACM TODS, IEEE TKDE, VLDB Journal and Information Systems.
Beng Chin is (was) a PC member of many international conferences, including SIGMOD'94,03,06, VLDB'96-97,99-02,04-08, ICDE'02,04,05-07, SIGKDD'06, ICDCS'07, WWWW'07-08, EDBT'98,02-08, CIKM'04-06, ACM-GIS'98-01, SSD'93-99 and DASFAA'93-04. He was a PC-Chair of SSD'93 and DASFAA'05, the conference chair for FEGIS'93, MDM'02 and DASFAA'06, a vice PC chair of IEEE ICDE'00,04,06 and the PC chair of SIGMOD'07. He is the core track PC chair of VLDB'08. He has served on the editorial board for the International Journal for Geographical Information Systems (Taylor and Francis), Geoinformatica (Kluwer Academics), VLDB Journal (Springer-Verlag), and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. He is a trustee board member of VLDB Endowment.
In other professional work, he has advised clients including Standard Chartered Bank, Ericsson, Warburg Pincus/iAsia; he has evaluated grant applications for Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong, Australian Research Grants Council, Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), Norwegian Research Council, Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB) and Agency for Science and Technology Research (A*STAR), and has served as a panel member for A*STAR SERC. He is a co-founder of Thothe Technologies (resulted from research in VIPER), and the founder of BestPeer BestPeer (resulted from research in BestPeer)
He is a member of ACM (SIGMOD) and IEEE(Computer Society).