His internship was the gateway to international exposure

Year 4 student Clarence ONG’s internship at national defense research agency DSO National Laboratories opened the door for him to present his work internationally.

Clarence (Major in Data Science and Analytics, Minor in Economics) worked with the pioneering Automated Protocol Analysis (APA) team at DSO. His role was to analyse recorded network traffic generated from an algorithm he designed, to draw useful insights in network communications for the team. In doing so, Clarence drew on his knowledge of statistical methods and performance metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of the team’s models.

His learning experience did not end there. After his internship, Clarence continued working with his supervisor and two DSO interns to publish a paper on exploring unsupervised learning methods for APA. The paper proposes a novel approach to automate the selection of dataset-dependent model parameters for feature extraction, resulting in improved performance.

This culminated in the opportunity to present the paper virtually in December 2021 at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence 2021 (IEEE SSCI 2021), a flagship annual international series of symposia on computational intelligence.

Clarence is “honoured and humbled to be able to represent both Singapore and NUS as a young publication author on the international stage”.

He adds, “The road to the conference was not a smooth sailing one. Our team encountered numerous challenges and obstacles but pulled through with a strong acceptance of our research paper by the conference’s reviewing committee.”

Clarence is a recipient of the DSO Scholarship for Aspiring Researchers (SOAR) award, and he will be joining DSO as a Defence Science Engineer upon graduation.

Congratulations, Clarence!