Douglas Abrams

Douglas Abrams has developed his workshops based on his experience as an entrepreneur and venture investor in Singapore, as a Vice President and corporate entrepreneur at JP Morgan in New York, as a lecturer on entrepreneurship at the National University of Singapore and as a workshop facilitator and trainer.

Douglas Abrams is a Founding Partner and Managing Director of Parallax Capital Management, a funds management company based in Singapore, where he co-manages the private equity business, focusing on venture investing in early-stage companies.

Prior to joining Parallax, Mr. Abrams managed information technology at J.P. Morgan for 13 years. From 1997 to 1999, he was Global Markets Head of Internet Marketing, where he developed and executed J.P. Morgan’s client Internet and e-commerce strategy.

He is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Business School, where he also is the academic supervisor for the NUS in Bio-Valley Program. He is on the organizing committee for the Start-Up@Singapore business plan competition and has previously served on the organizing committees for the Global Start-Up@Singapore, Start-Up Asia and Stanford Global Entrepreneurship Challenge business plan competitions. He has served as a judge, guest speaker and mentor in the Start-Up@Singapore business plan competition and was a judge in the Lee Kuan Yew Global business plan competition, the Wharton business plan competition, Ngee Ann Polytechnic Life Science Product Business Plan Competition, Nanyang Polytechnic School of Business Management's Best Business Plan Competition, and at INSEAD’s MBA program business plan presentations. Mr. Abrams is Co-Deputy Chairman of the Business Angel Investor Network of South East Asia. He was previously a member of the steering committee for the NUS Venture Support Fund (VSF I and VSF II) and is currently on the steering committee for the NUS FUSE Fund for student businesses. He also serves as an External Examiner, School of Business & Accountancy at Ngee Ann Polytechnic, and is a Visiting Professor in Entrepreneurship for the KIMBA program at Kasetsart University in Bangkok.

Mr. Abrams graduated from the Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania with a BAs in Communications and received an MBA from The Wharton School.

Aileen Sim

Since 2003, Aileen has been working closely with Douglas Abrams. She was a Teaching Assistant for Technopreneurship courses at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Entrepreneurship Center from 2003, while pursuing her undergraduate degree at NUS. During this time, she mentored many student teams to develop their business plans, many of which won prizes in business plan competitions. She was also a student ambassador and lead organizer in many entrepreneurship events such as national and global business plan competitions.

In 2005, Aileen was one of twelve people selected from the entire cohort in her university to participate in a year-long entrepreneurship program in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She worked as an Associate with serial entrepreneur-turned-investor, Josh Kopelman, at First Round Capital, an early stage venture capital firm that invested in companies like del.icio.us, Riya.com, Pandora, IronPort and Traffic.com. Meanwhile, she studied Technopreneurship at the University of Pennsylvania.

Aileen joined Expara, a company providing entrepreneurship training and advisory services, as an Assistant Trainer in 2006. In 2007, Aileen co-founded a company, First Meta, to provide financial services to online virtual worlds such as Second Life. Aileen has a B.Sc. in Applied Mathematics from the National University of Singapore.

Yen-Lu Chow

Yen-Lu Chow’s career in the information technology industry spans over 20 years, with the past 10 years in executive management and leadership capacities in research institutions, multinational companies as well as start-ups. For the past six years, he’s been actively involved in venture creation activities -- starting up new companies, turning around troubled ones, building teams and organizations, and serving as advisor and mentor to budding new ventures. He was a venture partner to Venture TDF, a Singapore-based venture capital firm with a global footprint, and venture advisor to S.AI.L Port Asia Pacific, regional incubation center for speech and language technologies. As an angel investor and advisor, he sits on the advisory board of a number of start-up companies in Asia and in the US.

He also consults for government organizations including Institute for Infocomm Research (or I2R, member of A*Star) and the Economic Development Board. He has been an active participant and contributor in the annual National University of Singapore’s Start-Up@Singapore business plan competition, as advisor, investor, and mentor, and has been a guest lecturer at the Center for Entrepreneurship and for the industry.

As a technologist, and an internationally recognized leader in speech recognition and Chinese language computing, Mr. Chow was the Chief Scientist of Apple’s Speech Program in Cupertino, California. As a result of his outstanding contributions to speech and language technologies at Apple, he was appointed Distinguished Technologist, thus becoming a member of a small and elite group of engineers, scientists, and technologists achieving this status, equivalent to the Director position in the multinational company. He was responsible for the development of PlainTalk, Apple’s continuous speech recognition system, and the first speaker-independent speech recognition product to be shipped on a mainstream personal computer platform; and the Apple Chinese Dictation Kit, Apple’s ground-breaking Chinese dictation product for the Macintosh that won the Best-of-Best Product Award in Comdex Asia. And as Technology Director the Apple-ISS joint venture, he invented the unified Chinese language computing architecture, and led the team to advance the state of the art in multi-modal user interfaces for Asian language computing. The resulting world-renowned research in Chinese dictation was recognized by the Singapore community and received the prestigious A*Star’s Technology Innovation of the Year Award.

As entrepreneur, Mr. Chow was the founder and CTO of AsiaWorks, a technology start-up that developed the world’s first multi-modal speech dictation, pen/handwriting recognition, and keyboard input solutions for the Chinese computing market, whose SPK product for Cantonese that won a prestigious Innovative Product of the Year award from the Hong Kong government. He assumed the position of Corporate Vice President of R&D, Lernout & Hauspie Asia, when AsiaWorks was acquired by Lernout & Hauspie, and was responsible for all of company’s research & development activities throughout Asia Pacific including Singapore, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Australia. He was the Managing Director of WholeTree.com, a leading multilingual technology and globalization software solutions provider in Asia, and managed the company through the difficult transition period of bankruptcy liquidation of the parent company and took on the challenge of rebuilding the company. He managed to recreate the company from the ashes, including recruiting the team, rebuilding the organizational capabilities, taking ownership of and leading the product development efforts, expanding marketing and market presence into Australia, Europe and the US, leading business development, establishing business partnerships, and otherwise reviving the company.

In research, Mr. Chow has deep and broad-based experiences in the area of speech, artificial intelligence and language, having led teams and performed hands-on state-of-art research in large vocabulary continuous speech recognition, natural language understanding, spoken language systems, speech recognition on small devices, multi-modal interfaces, audio mining, biometrics, noisy speech processing, speaker adaptation, speaker identification and verification, information retrieval, neural networks, multilingual search and indexing, applying pattern recognition to protein sequence modeling, and parallel computational techniques.

In commercialization, Mr. Chow had been responsible for the development of several award-winning technology systems and products, including Byblos, a state-of-art continuous speech recognition system with BBN; PlainTalk, Apple’s continuous speech recognition system; Apple Chinese Dictation Kit, Apple Computer’s ground-breaking Chinese dictation product; SPK, the world’s first integrated multi-modal speech, pen & keyboard input solution for Chinese computing; and WholeWeb, WholeTree’s globalization management platform.

Mr. Chow has a long running interest in leadership and organizational development issues. He is a strong believer in the all-important role that leaders play in building trust, cultivating a high-performance learning culture, and unleashing organizational potentials to achieve outstanding business results, critical in the age of the knowledge economy. His new venture WholeTree Ventures, started with the help of EDB, will be a platform for a series of technology and business ventures. WholeTree Technologies is the foundation for his activities in the speech and language technology arena. VisionWorks Leadership and Coaching Practice will focus on practical leadership development and coaching with an emphasis on developing entrepreneurial leaders for the knowledge economy.

Mr. Chow has given many presentations and seminars in international conferences and workshops, with over 30 publications in conferences and journals. He is a holder of 6 patents, with 12 filed. He received his MS and BS degrees in electrical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and successfully completed Apple’s Mentoring as well as MBA program for senior managers.