About Me
My name is Chen Ee Heng. I usually introduce myself as Chen. However, despite it
being placed first, it is not my first name, but rather my family name. My name comes from the
romanization of 3 Chinese characters, which refers to my family name, my generation name, and my
name. And yes, all of my siblings and cousins from my father's side have the same generation name
Ee, not bad right? So why do I still introduce myself as Chen? Simple, it is easy to pronounce for
native and non-native English speakers.
If you are wondering why I
have a Chinese name, it is because I am a third-generation Chinese descendant from the beautiful country of
Malaysia.
And yes, besides English I speak Mandarin Chinese, Bahasa Malaysia (the official language of Malaysia),
and German. But of course, being a programmer, I also speak Python3, C++, Matlab, and
HTML languages 😃.
Some information about what I do officially: I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at
MIRMI
, where I am working on the
Digital Heart Surgery
project in collaboration with the German Heart Centre Munich. In the project, I help coordinate the
research activities between the PIs at MIRMI and the doctors at the German Heart Centre Munich and also
look into ways to assist clinicians in the ICU using cameras. You can read more about it
here
. Before this, I did an industrial PhD with the German automobile manufacturer BMW in the field of
autonomous driving under the supervision of Jöran Zeisler from BMW and
Darius Burschka
from the Technical University of Munich. In my PhD dissertation
"Development of vision-based driving strategies for traffic junction scenarios"
, I developed a vision-based system that takes in camera images as input and decides whether a
traffic junction is safe to be crossed. The system uses convolutional neural network-based models to extract
information about the traffic scene as intermediate representations and uses them to make the final
decision with the help of a Bayesian network. I believe systems that use intermediate representations are
the way to go, especially when discussing safe and explainable AI.
When I am not doing official stuff, I can be seen roaming around shops, scouring ingredients to
make good food. If not, I am probably spending too much time on Twitter reading about AI or on Youtube
looking at the next travel destination. I have been living and traveling in europe for the past decade, so I
am open to suggestions for travels outside of europe! Currently I am staying in Munich (see photo below).