External Research Grants

The Singapore International Dispute Resolution Academy (SIDRA) is a platform for thought leadership in international dispute resolution theory, practice and policy, and will conduct the following research programmes for the next few years:
•    Dispute Resolution Empirical Research
•    International Mediation and the Singapore Convention on Mediation
•    Next Generation Dispute Resolution

PerFormRect aims to detect the misconceptions of students and utilize these insights in a feedback loop for crafting personalized formative assessment questions in programming education using Large Language Models (LLM). This project addresses Theme 4 (Leveraging Technology to Enhance and Personalize the Learning Experience) with efficient analysis of individual coding misconceptions and timely intervention through personalized coding questions for both practice and self-assessment. It tackles the pressing need to efficiently identify coding misconceptions of students and provide timely, personalized questions for both practice and self-assessment by students – tasks which are difficult for human instructors to perform at scale. PerformRect leverages on LLM to identify students’ misconceptions and generate personalized feedback (WP1) based on their code submissions. The identified misconceptions will also be used to generate formative assessment coding questions (WP2) tailored for their repetitive learning. The effectiveness of PerFormRect on students’ learning will be evaluated using randomized control trials (RCTs) in two institutions (for generalizability). In all, PerFormRect offers on-demand access, personalized feedback, tailored assessments and scalable programming skills development opportunities, allowing for a broader reach without sacrificing quality.

This project empowers educators to effectively leverage Generative AI as a transformative tool that not only identifies and addresses student misconceptions but also deepens understanding, fosters critical thinking, and enriches the overall learning experience. It proposes a novel AI-enhanced pedagogical approach called Debunkr, which utilises a cognitive conflict instructional approach to actively debunk misconceptions for university courses, potentially adaptable for any subject in the age of Generative AI.

TITAN 2.0 is a 2-year project to build an advanced AI-driven framework that identifies and fixes complex security flaws in software code. By combining traditional static analysis with the reasoning power of large language models (LLMs) orchestrated in an agentic fashion, the system extends analysis beyond individual functions to comprehend complex interactions across multiple files and modules. This allows it to catch interprocedural vulnerabilities that simpler LLM-powered tools often miss. Designed to support multiple programming languages such as Java, C#, Python, and JavaScript, the framework does not just flag risks; it acts as a digital security partner by providing automated CWE labeling, validated code patches, and developer-friendly reports. By integrating these smart agents, the project significantly improves vulnerability remediation to ensure that digital services remain secure and resilient.

This research / project is supported by the National Research Foundation, Singapore, and Ministry of Digital Development & Information under its Smart Nation and Digital Government Translational R&D Grant (Award No: TRANS2026-TGC01).

The project examines what Southeast Asian regional resilience consists of with respect to six contemporary challenges: creating regional order, maintaining supply chains, instituting soft law, managing digital threats, dealing with health pandemics, and managing demographic transitions. By discovering the ingredients that constitute regional resilience in these areas, the project seeks to provide insights on how Singapore and ASEAN can enhance their ability to withstand and recover from external shocks and perturbations to the region. This project is supported by the Social Science Research Council and will be done in collaboration with faculty members from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Nanyang Technological University (NTU).

This project explores what inclusive AI governance is, or could be, in six of Southeast Asia’s largest cities. It considers how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping urban governance, and how urban governance is shaping AI deployments. It argues that inclusion is not a technical feature of AI systems but a relational outcome of governance processes. It advances an Inclusive AI Governance Framework that links upstream policy design and regulation with downstream implementation and lived experience, analysing how institutional capacity, regulatory priorities, and local socio-economic conditions shape whether AI might mitigate or exacerbate urban inequalities. Through comparative policy mapping, ethnographic research, and cross-sectoral case studies in education, healthcare, mobility, and urban planning, the project will generate both theoretical insights and applied tools – including a framework, taxonomy, and handbook – to help policymakers and practitioners assess governance readiness, manage inclusion risks, and adapt global AI principles to diverse regional contexts.

This project is supported by the Social Science Research Council and will be done in collaboration with faculty members from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Nanyang Technological University (NTU).

This project is a complete end-to-end study on a more targeted approach to issue lightning risk alerts for ground personnel at Changi Airport to enable more granular decision-making. The project will include an economic study of operational disruption at the airport due to a lightning warning and event.

In offering the first sustained comparison between Alexis de Tocqueville and Friedrich A. Hayek., the book will allow the understanding of the underappreciated influence of the nineteenth-century Frenchman upon the development of the Austrian’s thought, a century later. By exploring Tocqueville and Hayek in tandem, it would be quite clear that despite Hayek’s reputation as being primarily concerned with questions of economic efficiency and with preserving the free market, his deepest concerns were with the ways in which centralisation erodes the individual’s desire for freedom as well as the individual’s capacities for exercising that freedom. Hayek’s insights about these dangers to liberty in the modern era arose from his engagement with Tocqueville, whose famous “soft despotism” first theorised how this process of psychological transformation could occur within a democratic society itself. Showing the connections between Hayek and Tocqueville, then, not only corrects a significant misunderstanding about Hayek’s concerns – and hence, potentially the applicability of those concerns in a world in which the socialist threat seems to have receded – but it will also allow us to consider the continued relevance of other aspects of Tocqueville’s thought, by bringing his perspective forward into a world of technology, bureaucracy, and globalisation.

Self-report bias remains a persistent challenge in ageing research, particularly in areas like income, healthcare utilisation, and insurance coverage. This project plans to leverage the Singapore Life Panel (SLP) - a nationally representative, high-frequency longitudinal survey of older adults - to evaluate the accuracy of self-reported data by linking key modules with administrative records via the national TRUST platform. By validating survey responses against administrative datasets, this project aims to correct the key variables to enhance the analytic precision and secondary usability of SLP data, as well as to establish longitudinal effects of lifestyle factors with objective health and economic outcomes.

This research proposal focuses on the intersection of trustful artificial intelligence (AI) and the digital economy, aiming to develop frameworks and technologies that ensure AI systems are reliable, transparent, and beneficial to economic growth.