Professor, Division of Computer Science

Director, Parallel and Distributed Computing Centre

School of Computer Engineering

Nanyang Technological University

Singapore 639798

Tel: +65 6790 4600

Fax: +65 6792 6559

Email: aswtcai at ntu dot edu dot sg

Dr. Cai is a Professor with School of Computer Engineering (SCE) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, and the Director of Parallel and Distributed Computing Centre. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science, from University of Exeter (UK) in 1991. He was a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at Queen's University (Canada) before joining NTU in Feb 1993 as a lecturer. Prof. Cai also held several guest and visiting positions, including a visiting professor with Nankai University (September 2004 – July 2007), a visiting fellow at High Performance Computing Institute, Tsinghua University (May – June 2001) under Tan Chin Thuan Fellowship Programme, and a visiting researcher at School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham (June 2004, May 2005, and September 2006) under UK e-Science Sister Project.

Prof. Cai's current research interests include: Parallel & Distributed Simulation, Multi-agent Systems, and Grid & Cluster Computing. His main areas of expertise are the design and analysis of scalable architecture, framework, and protocols to support parallel & distributed simulation, and the development of models and software tools for programming parallel/distributed systems. He has authored or co-authored over 180 journal and conference papers in the above areas, and six of his recent research papers won best paper awards in the following international conferences: EuroSIW'03, ESS'03, EuroSIW'04, DS-RT'04, EuroSIW'05, and PADS’06. His recent research has focused on system support for distributed simulation/virtual environments, and modeling and simulation of large-scale complex systems.

Prof. Cai has extensive collaboration with Singapore industries and research institutes on Grid Computing and simulation projects (e.g., with Singapore Institute of High Performance Computing on developing an e-engineering infrastructure over the Grid, with Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore on vessel collision simulation, and with Defense Science Technology Agency (DSTA) on consistency issues in distributed training environments). He contributed to the Singapore iDA Infocomm Technology Roadmap 2002 on Grid Computing and was a member of Network Working Group of Singapore National Grid Project. In 2003, he, together with his colleagues at School of Computer Engineering, pioneered the Nanyang Campus Grid which links high performance facilities around NTU campus.

In the last few years, Prof. Cai has been successful in attracting a total of S$1,585K external research funding as a principal investigator and S$1,787K as a co-principal investigator. In particular, he was awarded a research contract (S$1,092,385) by DSTA in November 2006 for a three-year project on “COSMOS: Crowd Simulation for Military Simulations”. He is also a co-principal investigator on the project “Towards Highly Interactive Distributed Media Environment”, funded under the NRF IDM Programme from December 2007 to November 2010 (S$954,000). Dr. Cai has graduated eight research Master and five PhD students, and is currently supervising two research Master and five PhD students.

Prof. Cai is a member of the IEEE. He is currently an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS), and editorial board member of Multiagents and Grid Systems – An International Journal. He was also an editorial board member of International Journal of Computers and Applications from 2004 to Mar 2009. Dr. Cai is the programme co-chair of DS-RT’09 and programme vice chair of EUC’08, CCGrid'06 and PDCAT'04, and has served as programme committee member for many international conferences. Most recent ones include: PADS’09, CCGrid’09, ICDCS’08, PADS’08, DS-RT’08, SCC’08, CCGrid’08, NPC’08, PADS’07, DS-RT’07, SCC’07, CCGrid’07, ISPA’07, NPC’07, PADS'06, DS-RT’06, SCC’06, APWeb’06, and ISPA’06.