Vincent Tan

Vincent Y. F. Tan was born in Singapore in 1981. He is currently a Dean’s Chair Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and the Department of Mathematics at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He received the B.A. and M.Eng. degrees in Electrical and Information Sciences from Cambridge University in 2005. He received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2011. During his Ph.D. studies, he spent two summers at Microsoft Research—the Machine Learning and Perception group in Cambridge, U.K. in 2008 and the E-Science group in Los Angeles, CA in 2009. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of ECE at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2011 and following that, a scientist at the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), A STAR, Singapore from 2012 to 2013. His research interests include network information theory, high-dimensional statistics, machine learning, signal processing and their applications.

Dr. Tan has received several awards for his research and teaching. These include the Charles Lamb Prize for being the top M.Eng. student in the Electrical and Information Sciences Tripos at Cambridge University in 2005; the MIT EECS Jin-Au Kong outstanding doctoral thesis prize in 2011; the A STAR Philip Yeo prize for outstanding achievements in research in 2012; the NUS Young Investigator Award in 2014; the Engineering Young Researcher Award in the Faculty of Engineering, NUS in 2018; the Singapore National Research Foundation (NRF) Fellowship (Class of 2018); and the NUS Young Researcher Award in 2019 (see an accompanying article by NUS Research). He is a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Information Theory Society (2018/19). A dedicated educator, he was also placed in the NUS Faculty of Engineering Teaching commendation lists from 2014/5 to 2016/7 and on the honours list in 2017/8.

He has authored a research monograph titled “Asymptotic Estimates in Information Theory with Non-Vanishing Error Probabilities” in the Foundations and Trends® in Communications and Information Theory Series (NOW Publishers). A Senior Member of the IEEE, he served as a member of the IEEE “Machine Learning for Signal Processing” Technical Committee within the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He is currently serving as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. He will serve as a TPC co-chair of the 2021 Information Theory Workshop (ITW) in Kanazawa, Japan. Within NUS, he is currently serving on the NUS Faculty (of Engineering) Promotion and Tenure Committee (FPTC) and the University-level Mid-Term Advisory Report Committee (U-MTARC) for Science and Technology Disciplines.

Education

• Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2007 — 2011)
• Master of Engineering (M.Eng.) University of Cambridge (2001 — 2005)

Companies

• Assistant Professor National University of Singapore (2014)
• Scientist Institute for Infocomm Research (2012 — 2013)
• Postdoc University of Wisconsin-Madison (2011 — 2011)

Skills

• Statistical Signal Processing
• Computer Vision
• LaTeX

Other

Algorithms, Signal Processing, Machine Learning, Information Theory