External Research Grants

This collaborative study between the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA) and SMU seeks to understand how audit fees are determined in Singapore relative to selected Asia Pacific countries, examine factors contributing to differences in audit fee levels across different markets, and provide insights that may inform future initiatives to support the competitiveness, talent attraction and sustainability of the audit profession.

In this project, we will investigate various low cost yet effective methods to detect commercial drones.

This project aims to develop a theoretical framework that improves fairness in sequential clinical decision-making when certain demographic or clinical subgroups are underrepresented in healthcare data, a challenge increasingly described as health data poverty. This problem has two reinforcing dimensions: imbalance across subgroups and small absolute sample sizes once data are stratified by clinically meaningful states, both of which increase estimation uncertainty and can cause naïve data pooling to introduce bias against minority groups, leading to less reliable decisions for underrepresented patients. The project will develop new methods that combine data pooling across patient groups with distributionally robust optimisation to improve decision quality and fairness under limited and imbalanced data. Working with clinicians at the National University Hospital, we will evaluate the methods in critical care applications including extubation timing, renal replacement therapy, and postoperative air-leak management.

Digital transformation is reshaping economic activity, yet its trade-offs remain incompletely understood. This study examines the overlooked externalities of digitalization across households, financial institutions, and corporations. While digital technologies expand access, lower transaction costs, and provide richer information, they may also create new vulnerabilities by altering how risks propagate, how consumers and depositors respond to information, and how firms allocate resources toward innovation.

The proposed project aims to develop and empirically test a novel, integrative theory of self-regulation that incorporates artificial intelligence as a constitutive feature of the work context. Using longitudinal designs to capture both short-term dynamics and longer-term developmental trajectories of employee adaptation, the research will advance theory at the intersection of digital transformation and human motivation while generating actionable insights for designing AI-enabled workplaces that enhance employee engagement, sustainable performance, and productivity in Singapore.

This project proposes an integrated research agenda to study the economics of financial inclusion across three critical and understudied domains: mobility into the formal credit system, how resilience is achieved through bundled product design, and the consequences of restricting access to high-risk financial markets. The overarching aim is to develop an evidence-based understanding of how modern financial systems shape household trajectories, and to provide a conceptual foundation for policy frameworks that balance innovation, consumer protections, and financial stability.

This project studies how large-scale transport investments reshape household welfare through two channels: family planning decisions and access to healthcare. Using the staggered reduction in travel times from China's road and high-speed rail expansion between 2000 and 2018, it estimates causal effects on fertility decisions, healthcare-seeking behaviour and health outcomes, then builds structural models to simulate alternative transport and medical-capacity investments. The findings will inform transport planning, healthcare system design and social policy by clarifying the extent to which connectivity improvements raise well-being and when complementary investments are needed to secure equitable access to essential services.

The project aims to address Singapore's demographic challenge by examining the psychological barriers that prevent young adults from forming relationships and families despite existing structural supports, and by introducing ‘paradox mindset’ – the ability to reframe life tensions as meaningful and generative – as a new psychological construct relevant to intimate decision-making. Through this project, the PI hopes to achieve the following objectives: 1) establish paradox mindsets, a cognitive style of embracing rather than avoiding contractions, as a transformative mechanism enabling individuals and couples to navigate tensions without perceiving them as zero-sum trade-offs, 2) examine how these mechanisms interact with socioecological conditions such as kin support and workplace flexibility, and 3) test whether paradox mindsets can be shifted through scalable interventions. Findings from the project will provide insights for policymakers to support relationship and family formation in Singapore by designing more effective interventions that help people navigate the psychological tensions that accompany multiple competing life goals. The research could also benefit other societies across Asia and beyond that face similar demographic challenges.

This project studies a new problem of sequential deepfake model attribution, where deepfake content is attributed to its source generative models under continuously evolving generation techniques. It aims to formulate this setting and develop machine learning methods for effective model attribution. 

This research/project is supported by the National Research Foundation, Singapore under its AI Singapore programme (AISG Award No: AISG3-RP-2024-033).

This project investigates the barriers and facilitators of responsible AI adoption, with a specific focus on Agentic AI, within Singapore’s labour and tripartite context. It uses a mixed-methods approach to examine the impact of AI on workers and aims to provide actionable guidelines on fair and responsible AI adoption by prioritising workers’ well-being and job security.