our Judges

We are honored to have the following judges for our Code for Cities hackathon this year, read more about them here!

Professor Lau Hoong Chuin

Professor Lau is a Professor of Computer Science at the School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University, and Specially Appointed Professor of AI and Information at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan. He is also jointly appointed by the Singapore Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) as a Principal Scientist in the Institute of High Performance Computing. Professor Lau’s research interest is in the design of algorithms for planning and optimization problems in logistics, transportation and related domains. He was awarded the Outstanding Professor Award by the Industrial Engineering and Operations Management Society in 2021 and named the top 2% scientists in the world in a global study by Stanford University conducted in 2020.

Professor Paul Robert Griffin

Professor Griffin is in SMU teaching postgraduate and undergraduate students in IT and FinTech as an Associate Professor of Information Systems. He gained a PhD in quantum well photovoltaics at Imperial College London in 1997 and is now researching disruptive technologies applications and impact specializing in blockchain and quantum computing. Prior to SMU, he was leading application development on global IT projects in banking for over 15 years in the UK and Asia in the financial industry.

Professor Griffin has a number of projects on-going for blockchain consensus, trade finance and portfolio optimisation. He has been advising companies since 2014 and presenting at events, judging hackathons and moderating panel discussions on FinTech.

Dr. Rudy Raymond

Dr. Rudy Raymond obtained B. Eng in Computer Science in 2001, M. Sc in Informatics in 2003, and Dr. of Informatics in 2006, all from Kyoto University. He has been a researcher at IBM Research Tokyo in Japan since 2006, a project researcher at Quantum Computing Center of Keio Univ. since 2018, and a lecturer at the Univ. of Tokyo since 2019. He has more than 16 years of experience applying technical skills in Quantum Computing, AI, Optimization and their potentials to real-world problems with industrial clients.

Dr. Shesha Raghunathan

Dr. Shesha joined IBM in 2011 as part of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) Timing analysis development team. He has worked on various aspects of analysis including noise, timing abstraction and reporting. He later focused on EDA 3.0 (analytics in EDA) and ML in EDA efforts and lead timing triage efforts. Since 2018, he has additional responsibility of being an IBM Quantum Ambassador, now a Distinguished Ambassador + Technical Ambassador, and is Asia-Pacific Geo Lead for the program. Recently, Dr. Shesha joined IBM Quantum and is responsible to drive development of strategic partnerships and in developing IBM’s quantum business.

Dr. Shesha got his PhD in Electrical Engineering (Quantum Computing) from University of Southern California, LA in 2010.