Team
Staff
Khairil Yusof
Coordinator
[email protected]
PGP ID: 889164CB
Programme Consultant with broad experience in managing, developing and implementing innovative development programmes for government, international organizations and civil society, that directly or indirectly involve digital technologies with limited resources in politically or technically constrained environments.
Has extensive cross-practice and cross-sector experience implementing programmes for UN agencies, governments and civil society in Asia-Pacific including digital rights, human rights, labour rights and environment. Also strong technical background in software development and systems administration with open source software, specifically FreeBSD and Linux operating systems, Python language and Plone CMS.
Current area of interest is in applying innovative methods of open data and standards, for transparency and anti-corruption.
Even though he is not as skilled in languages as his fellow team mates, but he primarily speaks Python, and a smattering of Go. In what little (if any) personal time left after spending time with his kids, he plays basketball, dabbles in gardening, playing keyboard and following what's happening in the different fields of design.
Siti Nurliza
Staff Technologist
Siti Nurliza is the Technologist at Sinar Project, managing a regional internet censorship project, iMAP (Internet Monitoring Action Project). With a background in Statistics, she does data analysis, managing Sinar's servers and provides technical advice to country partners from time to time.
Sam Ng
Knowledge Management & Community Officer
Sam has been a long time lurker at Sinar before joining full time.
Professionally experienced on web development, devops & cybersecurity, he enjoys using technology in novel & creative ways and can share with you various stories of Malaysians doing so. Once upon a time, he was active in the Maker community in Malaysia on Raspberry Pi & IOT.
He currently works on Knowledge Management efforts & also developing the Civic Tech community work in Sinar.
Sinar Project Fellowship Recipients
2026
Shafira Noh is building Bank Bench MY, to evaluate the safety of deploying LLM agents in Malaysian banking applications. Kharie Iswandy is implementing CI/CD pipelines (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Development) which is a software development method utilising automation to build, test and release code to strengthen Sinar’s DevOps capabilities.
Khairie Iswandy
Kharie Iswandy has a Bachelor’s in Computer and Information Science from Ohio State University and is currently a data scientist working on gathering a corpus in the form of social media posts to assist researchers at Initiate. Previously, they have participated in big data and data analysis work, assisting with the scraping of large corpora of data including U.S. Supreme Court records and social media data.
Kharie Iswandy passionate about leveraging technology for transformative social and political change, believing open access to technology across all of society is a crucial first step towards building a more just world. In their free time, they play Rhythm Games, work on completing creative programming projects, maintain their server, and aspire to build their own kernel and operating system.
Shafira Noh
Shafira Noh’s fellowship project reflects her role as an independent AI safety researcher and beliefs that the best AI-safety work works within economical constraints to help more individuals with restrained resources. Her prior research work includes mapping compute governance supply chains, evaluating whether LLMs maintain ethical boundaries in high-stakes scenarios, and exploring how non-Western philosophical traditions can inform AI safety discourse.
BankBench-MY (a safety benchmark for Malaysian AI banking agents) is a reflection of her building style, open, multilingual evaluation tooling, for consumers, families, government agencies, and NGOs to make better decisions about fast-moving LLM technology. Her approach is hands-on and designed for community impact : she was part of the winning team at the BlueDot–Apart Hackathon (AI Safety Public Education track) and has workshopped AI safety with 300 teachers at DutaGuru. She has previously served as campus director for Effective Thesis's AI Safety for ASEAN chapter, and developed Morph, an Apart Research hackathon-winning tool to make AI safety concepts accessible to non-technical audiences.
Off the clock she's teaching herself six languages at once and drawing Japanese-style line illustrations — because, for her, curiosity, care, and community centeredness are the same muscle. She works at a restrained scale so her evidence reaches more minds with greater clarity.
2025
Adhura H. Farouk
Melissa Lim Shi Hui
Corina Robert Mangharam
Alumni and Community Contributors
Kelly Koh
Former programme officer. Kelly Koh is an Advocate & Solicitor (non-practicing) and member of English and Malaysian Bar with experience in general litigation practice.
While at Sinar Project, she managed the iMAP regional network censorship and monitoring project while also providing administrative, finance & compliance procedures, and legal counsel to the organization.
Ng Swee Meng
Contributing Developer
Ng Swee Meng is one of Sinar's co-founders. Resident hybrid code monkey and server monkey volunteer for Sinar Project. Professionally experienced as a software engineer/programmer building web and backend applications in various environment. The tools of his choice are Linux, Python and Puppet. Generally, Ng Swee Meng spend the rest of his time on computer games and books. Occasionally, he is working hacking on code for fun and not necessarily profit.
Michael Leow
Contributing Developer
Michael is volunteering with Sinar Project since 2015 while on a year sabbatical from being IT Manager at Carlist.my.
He is taking a lead on the Freedom of Information Enactment efforts including deploying the Alaveteli platform, engaging FOIE stakeholders and getting buy-in from Selangor, Penang government. Usually, Michael have several systems hat on; playing with Ansible and Docker. When putting on dev hat, he mainly in PHP language but learning Go for 2015!
Kay Wong
Contributing Researcher
Twitter: @wkayn
Kay is a contributing researcher at Sinar. She is currently pursuing her Bachelors in Computer Science with a specialisation in Data Science. She is passionate about Machine Learning and data analysis, and is currently learning more about digital rights and open source development working at Sinar. In her free time, she’s usually working on her NLP project, learning new technologies, reading, and thinking about metaresearch.
Chow Chee Leong (Motionman)
Contributing Software Developer
Chow Chee Leong is a sentient keyboard smashing robot often seen in flip flops. He is Sinar's most prolific community contributor. He works on scrapers, data cleanup/import and he is also often Sinar's developer representative for +Poplus components. He helped rewrite the scraper for billwatcher, set up Sinar's local version of FixMyStreet, AduanKu.my, and helped importing a bunch of administrative boundaries for MapIt. Throughout the years of being an active sentient keyboard smashing robot, he develops in multiple languages including Python. Currently, he advocates for more GoLang and Docker use.
Contact us
Our team based in Malaysia. We love discussing project ideas and challenges. Drop us a line at [email protected]