Cheng Soon Ong

Research Affiliate

Cheng Soon is principal researcher at the Machine Learning Research Group at Data61 CSIRO, the director of the machine learning and artificial intelligence future science platform at CSIRO and an adjunct associate professor at the Australian National University. He is interested in enabling scientific discovery by extending statistical machine learning methods. In recent years, he has developed new optimisation methods for solving problems such as ranking, feature selection and experimental design, with the aim of solving scientific questions in collaboration with experts in other fields. This has included diverse problems in genomics, systems biology, and astronomy. The long term goal is to use active learning, bandits, and choice theory for design of experiments. He is co-author of the textbook Mathematics for Machine Learning. He supports and advocates open source software and reproducible research in the context of machine learning, for example via a JMLR special track, as well as the community sites mloss.org and mldata.org.

Previously, his PhD in Computer Science was completed at the Australian National University in 2005. He was a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute of Biological Cybernetics and the Fredrich Miescher Laboratory in Tübingen, Germany. From 2008 to 2011, he was a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, and in 2012 and 2013 he worked in the Diagnostic Genomics Team at NICTA in Melbourne.