King Wang Poon

Director, Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities

Singapore

"POON King Wang is the Director of the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), where he also heads the Smart Cities Lab and the Future Digital Economies and Digital Societies initiative. He is concurrently Senior Director of Strategic Planning at SUTD.

King Wang is on the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network on Cities and Urbanization, the Future of Work working group of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, the Board of Live with AI (an independent France-Singapore think tank on Artificial Intelligence), and a national taskforce on the future of adult learning. He was previously on the Board of the BCA Centre for Sustainable Buildings Ltd (a collaboration between the United Nations Environment Programme and Singapore’s Building and Construction Authority), the International Advisory Panel of IoT Asia, Co-Director of the SUTD-JTC Industrial Infrastructure Innovation Centre, and on a national taskforce on the future of services in the digital economy.

His and his teams’ multi-disciplinary research with collaborators has been recognized in the Singapore National AI Strategy for helping to build a trusted and progressive environment for AI that balances citizen needs with commercial innovation. They focus on the human dimensions of smart cities and digital economies, and the impact of digital transformation on the future of work, education, and healthcare, and on society at large. They also pay particular attention to how leaders of cities and companies can design strategies and policies to lift the lives of their citizens and workers, with the same technologies that are disrupting work, economy and society.

He draws extensively from his public and private sector experiences. He has served in the Economic Development Board; Ministry of Law; Agency for Science, Technology and Research; and the Competition Commission of Singapore. In the private sector, he was head of business analytics at one of Singapore's largest banks.

King Wang holds a MSc (Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management) from Stanford University, a BSc (Electrical Engineering) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a Rocket Engineering Certificate from Moscow State Technical University."