RESUME

* RECENT EXPERIENCE *

2015 – 2016

• Designed a REST based microservice architecture that connects ElasticSearch, MongoDB, NodeJS, Python Django and WooCommerce.
• Deployed Heroboyfriend on AWS using EC2 and Elastic Beanstalk
• Developed Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the chatbot, and a recommender system to provide suggestions based on customer preferences and usage patterns.
• Led and worked together with developer team to implement the architecture and built the first release from the MVP. Currently working on the second release that migrates from MeteorJS to ReactJS.
• Built products to streamline marketing workflows with the production database.

                                                     2014 – 2016

• Architected and built AI products for the parent company to serve clients from telcos and government agencies.
• Grew a tech team of 4 to implement algorithms using Python and R, and delivered customized big data solutions on Hadoop.
• Designed and implemented proprietary data lake solutions with data ingestion
  tools and customizable data pipelines.

                            2014 – 2015

• I mentored startups from South East Asia region in the MaGIC Accelerator Program (MAP), the largest accelerator program in South East Asia targeting startups with a regional focus.
• I equipped the startups with technical skills and entrepreneurial knowledge that accelerate their growth, conducted weekly office hour to advise startups on metrics to ensure they gain traction and the product iterations stay on the roadmap.
• I spoke at events and meetups to share my technical expertise at developer conferences organized by Google and Microsoft.

                           2012 – 2014

• I co-founded and built Co-opRating.com (now rebranded as JoinPluss.com), an online web application that serves as a project hub that helps users to connect people with the necessary skills, manage and communicate with project collaborators.
• I grew and led a team of 5 members to architect and build the entire project from end-to-end using Microsoft Azure, ASP.NET, and C#. I implemented core algorithm of a recommendation system to suggest users with exciting projects and connect similar users.

* WORK EXPERIENCE *

                              2006 – 2014

• Deliver weekly workshops to teach students in completing Web development tasks. Technologies taught includes ASP.NET, PHP using different IDE tools such as Visual Studio .NET.
• Delivered weekly lectures to assist students in understanding the emerging IT enabling technologies that explores wide spectrum of ideas and investigate modern technologies with critical analysis and insights to its history and future.
• Delivered weekly workshops to students in groups, to build enterprise software systems using different technologies (e.g. Java, .NET) and deploy to different platforms (e.g. Linux, Windows). This helps the students to fully understand the concept and achieve Service Oriented Architecture using web services and component services.

                              2007 – 2012

• Conducted environmental research by developing analysis program in Microsoft .NET to connect hardware with existing legacy solutions.
• Built a system that produces with an automatic process that performs Green House Gas (GHG) collection, chromatography to real-time analysis.
• Published data online for sharing with collaborators from other universities.

                         2008 – 2012

• Designed and deployed mobile sensors in the field to collect data for studying Australian natural habitats (e.g. birds, koala bears).
• Built a platform for scientists to research climate change, providing IT tools necessary to collate, manage and analyze vast amounts of information.
• Developed applications using Microsoft technology stack including C#.NET, .NET Compact Framework and Silverlight.

                        2003 – 2006

• Provide web design and application development services.
• Deliver e-commerce solutions, web portals for government software, real estate agents and shopping malls.

* DATA RELATED PROJECTS *

                               2014 – 2015

• Led a group of web and mobile developers to deliver an online portal for users to receive first-hand flood related information.
• Built the first MVP in less than 5 hours and rapidly iterate for 6 versions in the next 24 hours. We deployed the website on Azure platform, with front-end using AngularJS and BootStrap.
• Coordinated the developers to build microservices from back-end crawlers to text-processing engines, using multiple languages including Python, JavaScript, Ruby, C# and Php.

                                   2015

• WatchOverMe is a mobile app that turns a smartphone into a personal safety device. Users activate the app before journey and failure to check-in safely after the specific time will trigger an alert to the preset emergency contact.
• Worked with the engineering team to improve the product based on usage data, and constructed a predictive model to trigger security alerts from criminal records, police reports, and social media.
• WatchOverMe is later acquired by Carousell.

                       2013 – 2014

• Facebook Machine is a social media analytics platform focusing on Twitter and Facebook fan page.
• Facebook Machine analyses how the Australian citizen participates in current issues discussion, and how they respond to trending events.
• Built and improve the models derived by social study researchers, using big data and machine learning technologies to improve the model automatically.

                         2009 – 2014

• Built a topic detection system for short text (e.g. Twitter, Facebook status) by implementing the algorithm from my Ph.D. thesis.
• The system crawled 16 million tweets, and analyzed metrics such as @mentions, #hashtags, and followee-follower relationships. It provides a
dashboard that allows users to tune the parameters and visualize the effect of either a single metric or in different combinations.
• The system produced trending topics and a timeline view of how sentiments vary across a particular period.

                           2010 – 2013

• Built an election campaign system for monitoring the progress of Australia General Election in the year 2010.
• The system monitors the issues, debates, and policies, and tracks the general public reactions and responses using sentiment analysis.
• Built a dashboard to allow analyzing media coverage, candidate activities, parties interaction, visualize using heat map.

                          2010 – 2012

• Conducted research and built a prototype to detect and annotate key events of live sports videos. The system provides match summary and video highlights based on a novelty interesting score measurement.
• The algorithm breaks through traditional timestamp and match-report based methods, aggregate sentiments from social media and live commentary, combine named entity detection to identify key moments in a sports event.

                            2008 – 2012

• Implemented an environment sensing system by using acoustic sensing, to monitor animal species (e.g. birds, koala bears) that have unique
  vocalizations.
• This system alleviates the pain where traditional habitat sensing requires a large amount of human effort and long hours in the field, just to detect the presence of the wildlife.
• The sensors are built using Windows mobile, and a GUI analysis tool is built using Silverlight for users to manage the sensors, and analyse the
  recording spectrograms.

                               2008 – 2010

• Developed a news browsing and summarization system using named entity detection and topic clustering methods.
• The system allows users to browse news articles based on a person, location, event, and organizations involved in a news that is connected to external ontology (e.g.Wikipedia), to enrich the user reading experience.

                                                   2007 – 2012

• Developed a big data platform for Green House Gas (GHG) researchers to manage, share, and collaborate using data collected from the field.
• Data is collected via an IoT setup, with gas sampling and chromatography component, which collects and analyze carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone automatically.
• The sensors are deployed at various agricultural farm, and data are collected at real-time and sent back to a mobile workstation for processing. Processed data will be sent to the central server for storage, publish on Internet, where university researchers can login to view the shared data, perform analysis and visualize the results.

* OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENTS *

                                        2004

• Represented the country to participated in Microsoft Office Expert Academic Competition.
• Compete for completing tasks in Microsoft Excel using advanced techniques such as Pivot Table, Macros, Lookup Tables, Database and What-if functions.

                                     2014

• Led a team of five to develop and pitch a sports video highlight system that allows users to personalize their favorite sports highlights.
  For instance, in a soccer match, our system is able to detect corner kick, penalty, goals and exciting crowd moments.
• Users can then curate their own highlight video by selecting the type of events they like, rather than watching a sports highlight created by the broadcaster.

                                    2014

• Developed PocketEvents, a mobile app to assist event organizers to manage events by gathering participants’ information beforehand.
• Constructed the participant profile by crawling Spotify to know their music taste and then gather their Foursquare check-ins to understand their dietary requirements.
• This helps the event organizers to deliver a much pleasant experience for their guests.

* OTHER ACHIEVEMENTS *

• Led final year project on MS .NET e-Hub selected for Exhibition                                                                                                2004
• Awarded Microsoft Office User Specialist (100% marks)                                                                                                              2004
• Awarded Merit Award for SP Website Design Competition                                                                                                         2003
• Awarded Microsoft .NET Certified Application Developer                                                                                                            2002
• Awarded Microsoft Certified Professional                                                                                                                                       2002

* EDUCATION BACKGROUND *

                         2009 – 2014

• Research in Text Mining, develop news detection algorithm by analyzing microblogs metrics with machine learning techniques.
• Publish thesis “Detecting News Topics from Social Media using Text Mining”.

                         2007 – 2009

• Research in social media, understanding user behavior and develop algorithms to organize tags for online news.
• Publish thesis “Structuring Free Form Tagging in Online News”.

                           2006 – 2007

• Study technologies related to web design, programming, focus on databases, and its application in real-world projects.
• Achieve distinction in Database Design, Database Management, Modelling Analysis and Design, Enterprise Data Mining, Final Year Project and Introduction to Research.

* ACHIEVEMENTS *

2004
2004
2003
2002
2002

* PROFESSIONAL SERVICES *

• Speaker, Google Business Group and Google Developer Group
• Technical Mentor, Startup Weekend and Lean Startup Machine
• Technical Mentor, Malaysian Communications And Multimedia Commission
• Demonstrator and Speaker, Smartservices CRC (Australia)
• Technical and Research Consultant, Fairfax Media Ltd. (Australia)

* SKILLS *

Cloud Computing and Data Analysis
Microsoft Azure, Hadoop, SAS, WEKA

Full-stack Web Development
ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails, Python Django, MEAN

Web Front-end
HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, AngularJS, AngularJS2

Programming Languages
C#, Visual Basic .NET, Java

Scripting Languages
Python, Ruby

Database Technologies
Microsoft SQL, MySQL, NoSQL (Azure Tables, MongoDB)

Engineering Software
Matlab, R

Operating Systems
Diagnose, assemble and setup network for PC and Windows, Mac and OS X and Linux.

Mobile Programming
IOS (Objective-C), Android, Windows Mobile.

* ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS *

• Lau, Cher Han (2014) Detecting news topics from microblogs using sequential pattern mining. Ph.D. thesis, Queensland University of Technology.
• Tao, Xiaohui, Zhou, Xujuan, Lau, Cher Han, & Li, Yuefeng (2013) Personalised information gathering and recommender systems: techniques and trends. IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems, 13(1-3), e4. – Journal Article
• Lau, Cher Han, Tao, Xiaohui, Tjondronegoro, Dian, & Li, Yuefeng (2012) Retrieving information from microblog using pattern mining and relevance feedback. Data and Knowledge Engineering, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 7696, pp. 153-160. – Journal Article
• Tjondronegoro, Dian W., Tao, Xiaohui, Sasongko, Johannes, & Lau, Cher-Han (2011) Multi-modal summarization of key events and top players in sports tournament videos. In IEEE Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV2011), 5-6 January 2011, Sheraton Keauhou Bay Resort and Spa, Kona, Hawaii.
• Lau, Cher Han (2009) Structuring free-form tagging in online news. Masters by Research thesis, Queensland University of Technology.
• Lau, Cher Han, Mason, Richard, Pham, Binh, Richards, Mark, Roe, Paul, & Zhang, Jinglan (2008) Monitoring the environment through acoustics using smartphone-based sensors and 3G networking. In Langendoen, K (Ed.) Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Wireless Sensor Network Deployments (WiDeploy08); 4th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems, DCOSS 2008, 11-14 June 2008, Greece, Santorini Island.
• Lau, Cher Han, Tjondronegoro, Dian W., Zhang, Jinglan, Geva, Shlomo, & Liu, Y. (2007) Fusing visual and textual retrieval techniques to effectively search large collections of Wikipedia images. In Comparative Evaluation of XML Information Retrieval Systems, Springer, Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, pp. 345-357.
• Cai, Jinhai, Ee, Dominic, Lau, Cher H., Mason, Richard S., Pham, Binh L., Roe, Paul, et al. (2007) Acoustic sensor networks for environmental monitoring. In the 5th international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, 6-9 November, Sydney, Australia.