Rajesh Balan Named ACM Distinguished Member

Associate Professor Rajesh Balan is the only academic from Southeast Asia to be selected as an ACM Distinguished Member in 2018.

AsianScientist (Dec. 10, 2018) – Associate Professor Rajesh Balan from the School of Information Systems at Singapore Management University (SMU) has been honored with the title of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Distinguished Member for his outstanding scientific contributions to computing.

ACM is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society. The ACM Distinguished Member program, initiated in 2006, recognizes members with at least 15 years of professional experience who have made significant accomplishments, or achieved a significant impact, on the global computing field.

This year, Balan is the only academic from a university in Southeast Asia to achieve this recognition, alongside 49 others from around the world. He is also the first SMU faculty to be selected for this honor.

“I am honored and extremely humbled by this recognition from the ACM. I am indebted to my colleagues, advisors, mentors, and peers who have helped me over the years. In particular, I would like to thank the faculty and staff at the School of Information Systems in SMU who have helped me grow as a researcher and an individual, and also helped me build the Software & Cyber-Physical Systems research area to where it is today,” said Balan.

Having conducted research across many different areas of mobile computing, Balan’s work has resulted in solutions for problems in diverse areas, such as personal analytics, traffic management, social networking and digital wallets. He has also worked on mobile multiplayer game infrastructures, resource management issues on constrained devices and software engineering issues related to distributed software development and system migration.

As the director of the Livelabs Urban Lifestyle Innovation Platform, a large government-supported, city-scale research testbed focused on mobile computing technologies, Balan has spearheaded several research initiatives, including an indoor location system that can work with commercial Wi-Fi systems.

Over his nearly two-decade long career in computing, Balan has published more than 40 papers in refereed conferences and journals. His work has received numerous awards, including the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper awards in 2007 and 2011 for his work in empirical software engineering.

Going forward, Balan is leading a large multidisciplinary team comprising computer scientists, social scientists, educators and medical professionals to use passive sensing and analytics mechanisms for automatically detecting and correcting stress, depression and social inclusion issues across an entire campus population.

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Source: Singapore Management University.
Disclaimer: This article does not necessarily reflect the views of AsianScientist or its staff.

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