Professor Lam, Tak-Wah

About

Professor TW Lam joined HKU in 1988 upon receiving his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington. Currently, he serves as the Deputy Director of the School of Computing and Data Science (CDS) in Hong Kong and concurrently as the Executive Director of CDS in Shanghai. In this latter role, he orchestrated the groundbreaking establishment of CDS Shanghai, which was HKU’s historic first initiative to deliver its undergraduate (alongside postgraduate) education outside Hong Kong through an innovative one-school-two-cities model. Prior to this, he served as the Head of the Computer Science Department from 2018 to 2023, during which he spearheaded a massive expansion of the department and propelled it to a historic high in the UGC Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). His leadership

Selected publications

• R Luo, CL Wong, YS Wong, CI Tang, CM Liu, CM Leung, TW Lam, Exploring the limit of using a deep neural network on pileup data for germline variant calling, Nature Machine Intelligence 2 (4), 220-227 (2020)
• D Li, CM Liu, R Luo, K Sadakane, TW Lam, MEGAHIT: an ultra-fast single-node solution for large and complex metagenomics assembly via succinct de Bruijn graph, Bioinformatics 31(10): 1674-1676 (2015) [2016 HKU Outstanding Research Output Prize]
• CM Liu, T Wong, E Wu, R Luo, SM Yiu, Y Li, B Wang, C Yu, X Chu, K Zhao, R Li, TW Lam, SOAP3: ultra-fast GPU-based parallel alignment tool for short reads, Bioinformatics 28 (6), 878-879 (2012)
• TW Lam, LK Lee, KK To, PWH Wong, Speed scaling functions for flow time scheduling using active job count, Proceedings of European Symposium on Algorithms, pp. 647-657, 2008 (Algorithmica 65 (3), 605-633, 2013)
• TW Lam, WK Sung, SL Tam, CK Wong, SM Yiu, Compressed indexing and local alignment of DNA, Bioinformatics 24(6), 791-797 (2008).
• WK Hon, TW Lam, K Sadakane, WK Sung, SM Yiu, A space and time efficient algorithm for constructing compressed suffix arrays, Algorithmica 48 (1), 23-36 (2007)
• KW Chong, Y Han, and TW Lam, On the Parallel Time Complexity of Undirected Connectivity and Minimum Spanning Trees, Journal of the ACM 48(2): 297-323 (2001)
• MY Kao, TW Lam, WK Sung, HF Ting, A decomposition theorem for maximum weight bipartite matchings, SIAM Journal on Computing 31 (1), 18-26 (2001)
• M.Y. Kao, T.W. Lam, T. Przytycka, W.K. Sung, and H.F. Ting, General techniques for comparing unrooted evolutionary trees, SIAM Journal on Computing, 30(2): 602-624 (2000)