Dr Cheng Soon Ong

I am a principal research scientist at the Machine Learning Research Group, Data61, CSIRO, and am the director of the machine learning and artificial intelligence future science platform at CSIRO. I am also an adjunct associate professor at the Australian National University.

I am interested in enabling scientific discovery by extending statistical machine learning methods. In recent years, we have developed new optimisation methods for solving problems such as ranking, feature selection and experimental design, with the aim of solving scientific questions in collaboration with experts in other fields. This has included diverse problems in genomics, systems biology, and astronomy. The long term goal is to use active learning, bandits, and choice theory for design of experiments. I am co-author of the textbook Mathematics for Machine Learning. I support and advocate open source software and reproducible research in the context of machine learning, for example via a JMLR special track, as well as the community sites mloss.org and mldata.org.

My PhD in Computer Science was completed at the Australian National University in 2005. I was a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute of Biological Cybernetics and the Fredrich Miescher Laboratory in Tübingen, Germany. From 2008 to 2011, I was a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, and in 2012 and 2013 I worked in the Diagnostic Genomics Team at NICTA in Melbourne. Since 2014, I am doing research with the Machine Learning Group in NICTA Canberra. Prior to my PhD, I researched and built search engine and Bahasa Malaysia technologies at Mimos Berhad, Malaysia. I obtained my B.E. (Information Systems) and B.Sc. (Computer Science) from the University of Sydney, Australia.

http://ong-home.my/