We are pleased to share that our faculty Assistant Professor Dorien Herremans and our alumna, who is also our pioneer graduate, Jean Tan (Software Engineer, Government Technology Agency) made it to the 2021 Singapore 100 Women in Tech (SG100WIT) List. Alumna Glenda Wee (Computer Science and Design, Class of 2021) is also recognised in the Girls in Tech List which is newly introduced this year.

Assistant Professor Dorien Herremans

Dorien has successfully combined her twin love of music and AI into a research career. Her research was pioneering in the field, laying the basis of technologies now used by companies such as Aiva, Jukedeck, Spotify and other digital music platforms.

Currently, she is working on an AI system that can generate music based on the emotions desired by users. She is also developing a new neural network architecture that can represent audio so that it can be applied in multiple tasks such as speech recognition, hit song prediction, artist identification and others.

Dorien is excited about the nnAudio library that her team has developed. This library is a free toolkit that developers and engineers use to load audio data directly into a Python neural network.

She has received several awards in recognition of her efforts. She is also the recipient of many grants to advance AI for music and audio.

Dorien is extremely gratified to have gone from having to explain why anyone would want to use technology for music, to a living in a world where everyone has multiple apps on their phones that use music/audio and AI technologies including Siri, Spotify, Shazaam, and others.

Photo & text source: https://www.scs.org.sg/sg100wit-2021-list-citations

Alumna Jean Tan

An experienced software engineer, she is behind many systems that allowed the government to keep residents informed especially during the Covid-19 crisis. She was responsible for building several critical systems during the pandemic. The vaccine.gov.sg is a pre-registration and national appointment systems, that have resulted in garnering citizens to receive more than six million inoculations, significantly accelerating Singapore’s vaccination progress.

She was the lead engineer behind the 1.2 billion WhatsApp notifications sent by gov.sg, providing the public with timely and accurate information on Covid-19 developments.

Prior to the pandemic, she led the development and launch of Postman, a mass-messaging service that transformed the way the government communicates and connects with citizens. Since launch, Postman has delivered over six million email messages and 1.5 million text messages across 15 thousand messaging campaigns.

Photo & text source: https://www.scs.org.sg/sg100wit-2021-list-citations

Alumna Glenda Wee

Glenda has just graduated from the Computer Science and Design pillar in September 2021, and is part of the pioneer batch of students in SUTD-Duke-NUS Special Track. She is currently embarking on her Doctor of Medicine (MD) studies with Duke-NUS medical school.

Her aspiration is “to be able to speak both the languages of engineers and doctors”. Her zeal in technology is evident in the healthcare field, where she has embarked on several healthtech projects, including the most recent completion of her final-year industry-related capstone project with a local hospital.

She has also recently volunteered as a UX designer with GovTech working on the app, Supply Ally that facilitates distribution of various items to different groups of the Singapore population, including the dissemination of masks and Trace Together tokens during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Photo & text source: https://www.scs.org.sg/sg100wit-2021-list-students-citations

Organised by the Singapore Computer Society (SCS), in partnership with SG Women in Tech and Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) the list recognises and celebrates women based in Singapore who have been inspiring and have made significant contributions to the tech industry. The SG 100 Woman in Tech is part of the SG Women in Tech initiative launched in 2019 by IMDA and supported by the community and industry partners. It seeks to highlight the rich diversity of roles and spotlight the role models in Singapore’s dynamic ICT sector, in the hope of inspiring girls and women to pursue a career in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).

Read more about SGWIT 2021 here: https://www.scs.org.sg/awards/about-sg100wit

The news is also published on CNA website, https://cnalifestyle.channelnewsasia.com/women/women-girls-tech-singapore-284821

Read SUTD’s announcements here: https://www.sutd.edu.sg/About/Accolades/Faculty-Staff-Accolades/2021 and https://www.sutd.edu.sg/About/Accolades/Student-Accolades/2021