Profile
I'm Tien Cheng, a graduate of Singapore Polytechnic (SP) with a Diploma in Applied AI and Analytics, and a recipient of the Singapore Computer Society Silver Medal. As a former co-founder and operations department head of SPAI (an AI Singapore Student Chapter) in AY21/22, I actively promoted the field of Data Science during my time at SP.
Currently, I'm a full-time national serviceman (i.e conscript) at the Digital and Intelligence Service, but I also work on personal projects and competitions in my free time. After serving NS, I'll be doing an Computer Science undergrad at the National University of Singapore.
Education
Diploma in Applied AI and Analytics
2020 to 2023 at Singapore Polytechnic, Singapore- GPA: 4/4
- Relevant Coursework: Front End Web Development, Back End Web Development, AI and Machine Learning, Deep Learning, DevOps for Automa‑ tion and AI, Programming for Data Analytics and Statistics for Data Science
- Co-founded SPAI, an AI Singapore Student Chapter, organising three successful data science workshops (attended by over 80 students), helping SPAI to win an SP Excellence Award in its first year.
Experience
Conscript Soldier at the Digital and Intelligence Service, Singapore Armed Forces
From October 2023 to Present at Singapore Armed Forces, Singapore- Attained the platoon best trainee award in the Signals Institute Infocomm 2 vocational training course.
Co-Founder at Flora Softworks
From February 2023 to Present at Flora Softworks, Singapore- Flora is a tech startup that builds software to help organisations manage their information, with our primary product being an enterprise search application.
- Developed a custom search engine using Elasticsearch, and a microservice architecture using Jina and MongoDB, to enable organisations to index and search through their data sources.
- Developed unit tests for the AI microservices using Pytest, and also set up a Kubeflow pipeline on Vertex AI for running evaluation of our neural search engine using BEIR.
- Trained a custom object detection model using MMYOLO for document layout detection, applying techniques like knowledge distillation to improve inference speed by four times while also improving mean average precision (mAP) from 0.41 to 0.5 (a 21.95% improvement).
- Deployed the application on Google Cloud Platform and Firebase, and also performed on-premise deployment as part of a trial run for a client.
- Used OpenTelemetry in combination with Prometheus and Grafana to track and monitor the performance of the application, helping to identify and resolve memory leaks and bottlenecks.
Intern at Defence Science and Technology Agency
From September 2022 to February 2023 at Defence Science and Technology Agency, Singapore- Core developer of the AI App Store project, an in-house platform built using Vue.js and FastAPI for AI developers to publish and share their models in the form of model cards, and deploy containers as KNative services through a GUI interface.
- Developed API endpoints to enable the managing of services in a Kubernetes cluster through the app, as well as integration with the ClearML platform.
- Developed a custom WYSIWYG editor using the TipTap library, enabling the insertion of editable Plotly.js graphs within the markup.
- Wrote and maintained unit tests, and established automated testing through a CI pipeline deployed on GitHub Actions, resulting in a more reliable and robust application.
- Set up Helm charts, documentation and deployed the project on a Kubernetes cluster for use internally by two departments within DSTA.
- Contributed to a separate team project where I developed microservices for a prototype real time video analytics pipeline, integrating models like YOLOv5 and ByteTrack, using PyTorch, OpenCV, Triton Inference Server and Apache Kafka.
Certifications
- Generative AI with Large Language Models (2023)
- Introduction to Machine Learning in Production (2022)
- Deep Learning Specialization (2022)
- Machine Learning (2021)
- Wiley Certified Data Analyst (2020)
Skills
- Python
- Typescript
- C++
- Vue.js
- React
- Express.js
- Fastify
- FastAPI
- MongoDB
- MySQL
- Firebase
- Elasticsearch
- Google Cloud Platform
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- Git
- Scikit-Learn
- PyTorch
- Pandas
Awards
- NUS Global Merit Scholarship (2023)
- Singapore Computer Society Silver Medal (2023)
- Best Junior Hack of the NTU MLDA Deep Learning Week Hackathon (2021)
- Champion of the Collegial Artificial Intelligence Innovation Competition (2020)
- DSTA Polytechnic Digital Scholarship (2020)