William Tjhi has been practicing machine learning to solve industry problems for 16 years. He received his PhD from Nanyang Technological University in 2008, with a thesis on unsupervised learning for text data. He spent a few years with A*STAR where he learned how to scale up Machine Learning with distributed systems. When in GovTech, he contributed to the initial data science efforts in the organization. For a while, William was also the lead NLP at Traveloka. There, he appreciated the challenges of doing NLP in the then low-resource Bahasa Indonesia. This became an inspiration for him when he later initiated a program that focuses on building NLP resources for Southeast Asia languages in AI Singapore. In the early days of AI Singapore, he was one of the first engineers who set the foundation for the execution of the 100 Experiments and AI Apprenticeship Program. Today, William leads the applied research work on Regional LLMs in the AI Products division of AI Singapore. He is also a regular contributor in various regional tech communities including Data Science Singapore and Data Science Indonesia.
