Tan Tin Wee

Tan Tin Wee at a 2012 Internet Hall of Fame Membership Meeting

Tan Tin Wee (* 1962 ) is a Singaporean bioinformatician and university professor. He has been an Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the National University of Singapore and Founding Director of the National Supercomputing Center (NSCC) in Singapore since 1999 . As the inventor and founder of multilingual internationalized domain names (IDN) and a pioneer of the Internet, he was inducted into the first Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society in 2012 together with the founding fathers of the Internet .

life and work

Tan studied biochemistry at the University of Cambridge from 1982 to 1985 , then received a Masters of Science degree in molecular biology and biotechnology from University College London in 1986 and a PhD in molecular biology on vaccines from the University of Edinburgh in 1990 . He returned to Singapore in 1990 to develop TechNet, Singapore's first network for a nationwide research community. In 1994, he and his team wrote a program for the Chinese language that matched the code for each character and then merged the images into one larger image, and extended that concept to the Tamil language. Tan was responsible for several major Internet milestones including the first Gopher server , the Singapore InfoWeb, and the forerunner of the Present National Web homepage. While he was in charge of the Internet Research and Development Unit (IRDU), Singapore had the first regional Java website and the first functional multilingual Domain Name System (DNS). In addition to his NIS position, Tan is also chairman of the agency for the Computational Resource Center for Science, Technology and Research, which aims to equip Singapore with supercomputing capabilities in the twenty-first century. With this in mind, he is now doing pioneering work in the use of new technologies for online communication by computers. Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol (TCP / IP), the old communication language the Internet uses today, is an inefficient, computationally intensive technology that barely manages to handle billions of devices online. A newer communication technology called InfiniBand transfers data with much shorter delay times, less information loss, and higher efficiency than TCP / IP. However, it is currently only used for short-range supercomputers. In November 2014, his team, together with Australian, Japanese and US universities, as well as industrial partners Obsidian Strategics and Tata Communications, demonstrated the first long-range InfiniBand high-speed connection between three continents on a platform called InfiniCortex. In traditional grid computing, distributed processors perform tasks that are parallel but more or less independent. Instead, InfiniCortex offers simultaneous supercomputing, in which intermediate results can be quickly transferred between processors that are located over global distances. In this way, the participating centers can carry out more complex tasks - such as B. computational fluid dynamics or the analysis of genomic data - on their own supercomputer resources.

Awards

He has received national and international recognition for his work: the Singapore Youth Award for Excellence (1994), the Vaccine Research Trust Annual Award (1989), the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry (JCCI) Education Award (1997), the ASEAN Achievement Award ( 1997) of the ASEAN Business Forum, the Life Insurance Association (LIA) Award for community work, the 7th Innovation Award of the Indian Culture Festival (1998), the Achievement Award (1998), the gold medal of the World Medical Informatics Congress MEDINFO'92 and he is a member of the International Who's Who of Professionals (1999) and member of the exclusive World Technology Network (2001) as one of 450 leading scientists and entrepreneurs worldwide.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Tan Tin Wee
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Singaporean bioinformatician and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH	1962