Profile Tan Tin Wee

Brief - June 1999

Long history of pioneering involvement with the Internet since 1991

Under his leadership, Singapore hosted the first Chinese Website in 1994, the first Tamil Web site using Tamil scripts in 1995, and a multilingual web site in 1996. During his headship of the Internet Research and Development Unit (IRDU), Singapore became the first regional Java Web site, VRML Website, 6Bone node, ActiveX Web site and the world's first operational Multilingual Domain Name system (iDNS).

His near misses include fostering the first Asian email forwarding system POBox, before Hotmail became wildly successful; Allo! java chat system while ICQ made its international debut; Auto-GIF multilingual image rendering system before Sinanet became prominent. Currently, he is trying to drive the commercialisation of several technologies - MIRAGE, multilingual Java Input and multilingual DNS.

The biggest challenge was to successfully initiate the first Asian STAR-TAP GigaPOP in November 1997, the first advanced research network (SINGAREN) to link to the USA vBNS outside North America. He continues to drive Asia Pacific advanced networking technologies through his founding role in the Asia Pacific Advanced Network consortium (APAN) and his current portfolio as User Community Co-Director, particularly in the bioinformatics and medical informatics area. He has successfully driven the formation of the Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Network (APBioNet) and the Asia Pacific Association for Medical Informatics (APAMI) telemedicine project.

Three Decade Track Record for Awards

In 1989, he won the Annual Prize of the Vaccine Research Trust, UK for his pioneering work on developing recombinant DNA vaccines for chlamydial infections at the Moredun Institute, Scotland. He won the Gold Medal at the World Congress for Medical Informatics in 1992 for his work in biocomputing and Internet, and was awarded the Singapore Youth Award for excellence in Science and Technology in 1994. In 1997, he led the team which was awarded the Life Insurance Association Award for volunteer community work in introducing Internet technology to the disability communities. In the same year, he was awarded the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry (JCCI - Singapore Foundation) Education Award for his work on Internet technologies for education (previous winners including Dr Tony Tan and Prof Lawrence Chia).

In the same year, for his work in promoting R&D, he was awarded the ASEAN Achievement Award by the ASEAN Business Forum in Jakarta (other winners from Singapore including Dr Cham Tao Soon, President, Nanyang Technological University).

In 1998, in recognition of his pioneering contribution to the Tamil-speaking community in Singapore and world wide, through the development of Tamil Internet in Singapore, and the initiation of the first International Tamil Internet Symposium, the Boon Lay Community Centre organising committee awarded him and his colleagues the 7th Indian Cultural Festival Innovation Award. He continues to guide the development of Tamil internet. At the same time, he is also involved in the National Chinese Internet Steering Committee, as well as fostered the first Malay internet website, KampungNet. He is now technical advisor to the nascent Tamil Internet Steering Committee.

Career Appointments

He has successfully conceptualised and initiated a $28M project to link Singapore into the vBNS (Very High Speed Backbone Network Service) and Internet 2 of the USA through the formation of a Singapore Research and Education Network (SINGAREN), which is now transitioned to CIR and the Kent Ridge Digital Labs (KRDL).

In 1996, after six years of negotiation, he and his colleagues finally established the formation of a Bioinformatics Centre (BIC) at the National University of Singapore with seed-funding of S$6 million from the Economic Development Board. He is now Director of BIC (concurrently Associate Director of CIR).

To commercialise biocomputing software solutions, he has co-founded a start-up Bioinformatics company (BIX) in Singapore with a presence in Menlo Park, California (1997). This company has completed a major contract with Schering Plough Research Institute with revenue of S$250,000 in the first year. It has now signed deals with JoyMail, SinaNet and Yahoo for some generic Internet technologies. In December 1998, BIX successfully licensed bioinformatics technology to a USA startup bioinformatics company, KRISTECH Inc. which is a $1.6M BIX-KRDL-NUS spin-off. BIX is now in the process of spinning off another company to handle the multilingual domain names system which he conceived and invented in March 1998.

On the conference circuit

As a Molecular Biologist

Current Research Interests

Community Service

Professional Membership and Service

Appointments (Websites)
Director, Bioinformatics Centre, NUS http://www.bic.nus.sg
Associate Director, Centre for Internet Research, NUS http://www.cir.nus.sg
Chairman (retired), Asia Pacific Networking Group (APNG) http://www.apng.org
Co-Director, Asia Pacific Advanced Network consortium (APAN) http://www.apan.net
Special Advisor to Director General, Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC) http://www.apnic.net
Singapore's oldest extant Website since September 1993 http://biomed.nus.sg (redesignated biomed.nus.edu.sg in accordance to new SGNIC rules)