Tat-Seng Chua
Also known as Chua Tat-Seng, 蔡达成
Tat-Seng Chua is an NUS computer scientist whose work spans multimedia retrieval and multimodal AI. He studied civil engineering and computer science at Leeds, earned a computer science PhD there, joined NUS as a lecturer, and worked on early image and video retrieval. He served as founding dean of NUS Computing and has co-directed the NUS–Tsinghua NExT Center since 2010; honors include ACM SIGMM's 2015 contribution award, NUS's 2022 Research Recognition Award, election as a Singapore National Academy of Science fellow in 2024, and the CCF Overseas Outstanding Technical Contributions Award in 2024. In 2025, he developed AlphaEdit with researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China; the method uses a null-space projection to update language models while preserving retained knowledge, and the paper won an ICLR Outstanding Paper Award. UniMuLM combines music notation and waveform audio and won Best Paper at MMM 2026; as of October 2026, he is KITHCT Chair Professor at NUS.
- Now at
- National University of Singapore and NUS–Tsinghua NExT Center
- Works
- 1,249
- Citations
- 64,439
- h-index
- 113
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 15 October 2026.
Timeline
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1979–1995
Leeds and multimedia retrieval
He earns a BSc in civil engineering and computer science at Leeds in June 1979 and a computer science PhD there in February 1983. He joins NUS as a lecturer from 1983 through 1988, and his early work includes image retrieval with relevance feedback in 1991 and video retrieval and sequencing through metadata and cinematic rules in 1995.
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1998–2000
Founding dean at NUS
He serves as founding dean of NUS's School of Computing from 1998 to 2000.
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Since 2010
Co-directing the NExT Center
He becomes co-director of NExT in 2010, a joint research center between NUS and Tsinghua University focused on extreme search.
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2015–2024
Awards and academy fellowship
ACM SIGMM names him its 2015 Award for Outstanding Technical Contributions to Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications for work in multimedia, text, and social media processing. NUS gives him its Research Recognition Award in 2022. In 2024, he is elected a Fellow of the Singapore National Academy of Science and receives the CCF Overseas Outstanding Technical Contributions Award.
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2025
Working with USTC on AlphaEdit
He develops AlphaEdit with researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China as a knowledge-editing approach.
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2025
AlphaEdit’s method and award
AlphaEdit uses a null-space projection to update language models while preserving knowledge they should retain. The paper wins an ICLR 2025 Outstanding Paper Award.
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January 2026
UniMuLM joins score and audio
He coauthors UniMuLM, a model that brings symbolic music notation and waveform audio into one language model. The system wins Best Paper at MMM 2026 in January 2026.
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As of October 2026
KITHCT Chair Professor at NUS
As of October 2026, he is KITHCT Chair Professor at NUS's School of Computing.
Sources and credits
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- CHUA Tat Seng - NUS Computing
- Ai Researcher | Chua Tat Seng | Singapore
- SIGMM Award for Outstanding Technical Contributions to Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications | ACM SIGMM - the Special Interest Group on Multimedia
- Professor Chua Tat Seng Conferred the Singapore National Academy of Science Fellowships
- Up-to-date AI Without the Side Effects: How AlphaEdit Could Change the Way We Edit Knowledge in Language Models - NUS Computing
- Announcing the Outstanding Paper Awards at ICLR 2025 – ICLR Blog
- Teaching AI to Work Across Symbolic Notation and Audio - NUS Computing
- NUS Computing Team Wins Best Paper Award at MMM 2026 - NUS Computing