Prof Tan is the Founding Director of the University of Hong Kong's E-Business Technology Institute (ETI), which was established in September 1999 as a partnership between the university and IBM.
Prof Tan's current professional interests lie in the research and development of practical e-business technologies and solutions most relevant to the Greater China region. He is very active in promoting the adoption of e-business technologies and practices in the business and academic communities. Under his leadership, ETI has successfully developed many leading edge e-business technologies and solutions, and has conducted many consulting services for public and private enterprises, including SMEs, in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta region.
Before taking up the helm at ETI in September 1999, Prof Tan served as Senior Manager at IBM Research for Application Systems, responsible for managing e-business application-related research activities. In 1997, he led the IBM Deep Blue team in an historic match against the world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Prof Tan's main research dealt with the architecture and machine design for high performance computing systems, and later, the application of these systems for e-business solutions. This research resulted in the highly successful launch of the IBM parallel computer, the RS/6000 SP.
Prof Tan is actively sought after as an advisor by many international technical and academic institutions. He serves as the Managing Director of ETI Consulting Limited (ETIC); and as Adjunct Professor at Chongqing University, China Central University of Science and Technology, and Harbin Institute of Science and Technology; and as Guest Professor at Zhejiang University. He also serves on the management boards of the E-technology Research Center of Shanghai Jiaotong University and CEPBA-IBM Research Institute (CIRI) at Polytechnic University of Catalunya, Barcelona in Spain. In addition, he serves as the Consulting Expert to the Shanghai City Science and Technology Commission on the Shanghai City Grid project.
Prof Tan is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering Sciences. He was also a founding Council Member of the IBM Deep Computing Institute.
Prof Tan received his BSEE degree from Seattle University in 1963 and his Doctor of Engineering Science degree from Columbia University, New York, New York, in 1969.