Graduate Feature

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Graduate Studies – The PhD Experience

Chen WeilingChen Weiling
PhD, Class of 2019
Senior AI Engineer, AI Singapore

Country of Origin: China

As a Senior AI Engineer at AI Singapore, I design and organize AI related challenges to bring together all Singapore-based research institutions and the vibrant ecosystem of AI start-ups and companies developing AI solutions to tackle the most challenging topics in all aspects of life including health, education, urban planning, etc. The skills developed while at SCSE and through National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science & Technology (AIST), Japan – critical thinking, research methodologies and integrity, technical writing and leadership are invaluable for my career.


Debjyoti Bhattacharjee

Debjyoti Bhattacharjee
PhD, Class of 2020
Research and Development Engineer, Imec, Belgium
Country of Origin: India

During my PhD at SCSE, the experiences were invaluable. Working at the intersection of technologies and design automation, I worked extensively on enabling end-to-end mapping flows for performing general purpose computing inside the memory arrays themselves using primitive logic operations. I also pursued two research internships from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland and Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. The internships offer a broad scope to observe different approaches to conducting research in different labs.

Parastoo Fahimi
Parastoo Fahimi
PhD, Class of 2020
Postdoctoral Researcher, Singapore-ETH Center
Country of Origin: Iran

My beautiful journey at SCSE was surrounded by nice people, amazing professors, especially my supervisor, and massive research resources! I had to take advantage of this great opportunity and thereby made my experiences here so enjoyable despite all the stress that “Ph.D. life” can bring. I also spent a few months at Aalborg University, Denmark and I had such a wonderful time! Crossing borders expands the learning, and so never miss an overseas internship opportunity!

Being graduated from a world-class school opens up incredible opportunities, and for that, I am forever thankful.


Tao Qingyi
PhD, Class of 2022
Economic Development Board - Industrial Postgraduate Programme (EDB-IPP)
Country of Origin: China

My supervisors are very responsible to their students’ research work, study and school life. There are regular 1-on-1 meetings to share my thoughts, doubts, and difficulties encountered in my research work and school life. I am involved in the IPP with EDB, attached to Nvidia. In this programme, I have the opportunity to work on research projects to solve problems in industry. I also learned new knowledge and skills in the company to facilitate my research.

Tao Qingyi

Zeng Zhiwei
Zeng Zhiwei
PhD, Class of 2021
Research Engineer, Joint NTU-UBC Research Centre of Excellence in Active Living (LILY)
Country of Origin: China

In the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program (IGP), I study explainable AI in healthcare applications, i.e., how to use AI to assist healthcare decisions. This requires understanding the AI technologies and the knowledge related to specific applications, such as diagnosis of Dementia and Parkinson’s Disease. I am privileged to have 3 supervisors, including an expert in AI and a renowned geriatric doctor, who enable excellent research and learning process. Thanks to NTU’s corporate labs and industry collaborations, I am able to conduct more translational research and real-world applications.

Burak Satar
PhD, Year 2
Country of Origin: Turkey

I am delighted to do PhD in SCSE/NTU since there are lots of opportunities to do valuable research and recreational activities simultaneously. Most of the lectures in our school regarding my field focus on state-of-the-art technologies, which is useful for our research. Also, having advanced research groups in our environment inspires us to do more. The campus has Yunnan Garden and a lake to walk around, a running track around itself, very active social societies to join, and much more. Lastly, living on this green campus is refreshing and convenient to catch all the vibes of NTU.

Burak Satar

Kevin Ong Shen Hoong
Kevin Ong Shen Hoong
PhD, Final Year
Internship: Robert Bosch Security Solutions
Country of Origin: Singapore

I am very grateful for the exclusive opportunity to learn and conduct research under one of the world’s Global Highly-Cited professors at NTU, Professor Dusit Niyato. Despite his busy schedule, he always makes time for my queries and provides prompt constructive feedback. When things don’t go as expected, his encouragement has helped shape me into a person I am today, one with qualities of grit and perseverance.
The once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to research on IOT, especially with my sponsor company – Robert Bosch – makes my research journey worthwhile.

Manoj Shakya
PhD, Year 2
Country of Origin: Nepal

Choosing to study in NTU was the best decision of my life. It gave me an opportunity to interact with inspiring faculties. The outstanding study spaces in NTU are easy to access. This highly ranked university not only gives me an opportunity to collaborate with industries like SIMTech*, but also provides me with state-of-the-art GPU-based servers for my work. As an international student, I feel that NTU is providing me with a wonderful PhD experience where I get an opportunity to interact with talented international students. By the time I graduate, I will be stronger academically and knowledge wise as well and will be ready to serve the society.

*Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology (SIMTech) @ NTU

Manoj Shakya

Maruf Saiful Bari
Maruf Saiful Bari
PhD, Year 3
Internship: Amazon Web Services
Country of Origin: Bangladesh

My research objective is developing deep models that have the notion of humanity (brain motivated) and my supervisor is Prof. Shafiq Joty. I did my internship at “Amazon Web Services, Inc” with Lex (chatbot) team. During this time, I went through developing and improving fundamental components of multi-lingual aspects of the NLP system. The internship allowed me to experience, explore and perform state-of-the-art research at Scale. My future plan is to develop “Multi-lingual NLP Brain” through my research and eventually contribute to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

Nandish Chattopadhyay
PhD, Year 3
Internship: Apple
Country of Origin: India

As a graduate student at SCSE, I was exposed to state-of-the-art research in my field of machine learning and data science. This has enabled me to have a holistic view and understanding of the progresses and challenges in AI. 
I am currently an intern at Apple, working as a Machine Learning Engineer in the Algorithms team. I am thankful to NTU, my professor and Apple for this opportunity, where I get to dive deep into extremely large datasets and work on scalable models and algorithms. I hope I shall be able to make meaningful contributions during the internship.
Nandish Chattopadhyay

Nguyen Xuan Phi
Nguyen Xuan Phi
PhD, Year 2
Internship: Facebook Inc, Singapore, 2021
Country of Origin: Vietnam

During my PhD program, I had a precious opportunity to do a research internship at ‘Facebook AI Research (FAIR)’, which is one of the most prestigious corporate research labs in the world. Acceptance to this department is often rare and highly competitive and I had to compete with many PhD students and scientists across the world. I stayed in Singapore and worked with my research team in the United States. I enjoyed a wonderful experience at Facebook where I got many opportunities to interact and discuss ideas virtually with many famous people in the field of AI.

Wang Ruihang
PhD, Year 2
Country of Origin: China

Life at NTU is a great journey with attractive surroundings and brilliant people from all the world! As an international student, I feel fortunate to be enrolled in the NTU PhD program. The road of the PhD study is not always easy and often full of challenges. However, NTU provides me abundance of resources to conquer these challenges. I can easily get access to the state-of-the-art facilities, like the high-performance computing, and interact with outstanding professors, smart colleagues and helpful staff. I have also had many opportunities to collaborate with people from different expert backgrounds, in various industries and business. 
Wang Ruihang

Zhang Huaizheng

Zhang Huaizheng
PhD, Year 5
Internship: Bytedance AI Lab, Beijing, 2019
Country of Origin: China

During my internship at ByteDance AI Lab, Beijing, my task was to optimize the deep learning model serving system to speed up model inference and save cost. It was really a fantastic experience. I enjoyed the happy, vibrant and professional atmosphere there, and the completed office automation system enabled me to focus on my work. I was exposed to the most practical research problems and worked with many top system researchers around the world to address these issues.