External Research Grants

This research project aims to document and analyse the state of legal innovation in the Asia Pacific region. Building upon the State of Legal Innovation in the Asia-Pacific Report 2019, a report will be produced introducing readers to recent legal technology and innovation developments in over 10 selected Asia Pacific countries, as well as an overview of legal innovation in these jurisdictions. A set of law firm case studies detailing industry efforts in the area will also be produced. The report is meant to serve as a roadmap for lawyers, courts, technologists, and policymakers to key legal tech and innovation trends on this side of the world.

Principal Research Collaborator: Josh Lee (Asia-Pacific Legal Innovation and Technology Association)

Smart systems are increasingly dependent on machine learning frameworks for their feature implementation. These frameworks are built on top of many third-party libraries, which depend on many others. Simply trusting and reusing a framework poses a security risk as the framework and third-party libraries it depends on can contain exploitable vulnerabilities. To mitigate this risk, this project will create an advanced solution that identifies vulnerabilities in popular machine learning frameworks.

This research collaboration with Zhejiang University seeks to unlock the power of large software data stored in open software repositories for automating three common software development tasks: coding (code completion), commenting (code summarization), and identification of software defects (defect prediction).

This project aims to provide early evidence on the value of blockchain applications by examining their impact on the issuance of asset-backed securities. In particular, the team would like to investigate whether asset-backed securities issued using the blockchain technology have lower yield and lower issuance cost as compared to other asset-backed securities.

Innovation has often been regarded as a key driver of organizational and individual level success in the 21st century. For example, the Singapore government has on many occasions emphasized the importance of innovation for the nation to stay ahead of competition and remain adaptive toward external changes and disruptions. Major economies such as U.S. and China have also identified innovation as key strategic thrusts. Toward this end, organizations all over the world have been actively seeking ways to increase their employees’ creativity and innovation effectiveness. However, academics and business observers have also noted that Asian firms tend to lag western firms in innovation in part because Asian cultures that tend to impose more, norms, rules, and constraints on people’s behaviours.

In this research project, the team will take the construct of cultural tightness to the organizational level to examine how the tightness of an organization’s culture might influence its creativity and innovative capabilities in the Asian context. This inquiry is important because national and regional culture is typically not within the control of an individual or a small group of people, regardless of how motivated they are. It is extremely unlikely for an organization or a CEO to change the culture of a country or a province/state. Yet, CEO’s and senior executives have the power to directly influence and shape the culture of their organizations. By understanding the effect of cultural tightness at the organizational level, the team can help organizations better harness the creativity and innovation benefits of their organizational culture. Specifically, knowledge gained from their research can help companies develop the appropriate set of rules, policies, and norms to maximize creativity and innovation. By focusing on the Asian context, the team will also shed light on the variations among Asian firms in the way they organize and how that affects creativity and innovation.

Singlish is an English Creole language used in Singapore and it is evolving. New words have been introduced from time to time making it difficult to track the development of this language. With Singlish being used largely in informal conversations, it is extremely challenging for any linguistic expert to keep track of its changes. It is therefore necessary to combine machine learning and human expertise in a crowdsourcing approach to construct and maintain a Singlish dictionary at speed and scale, with reasonable quality. This project will use a combination of machine learning and human efforts in a crowdsourcing approach to learn Singlish words so as to build some sort of Singlish dictionary.

Like many other cities in the world, Singapore faces a problem of high temperatures arising from a combination of:

• The urban heat island (UHI) effect, which can be in excess of 7˚C between urban and rural areas in Singapore.
• Greenhouse gas emissions driving global climate change that may increase long-term mean temperatures by between 1.4˚C and 4.6˚C by 2100.

For Singapore, being a large and densely populated city in the tropics where it is already hot and humid, further increasing temperatures will be detrimental to its population, economy, and ecosystems. The Cooling Singapore 2.0 research project aims to build a Digital Urban Climate Twin (DUCT) for Singapore by integrating all relevant computational models (environmental, land surface, industrial, traffic, building energy) as well as regional- and micro-scale climate models used in previous UHI and outdoor thermal comfort (OTC) research. The project team will work closely with relevant government agencies to use DUCT to evaluate quantitatively robust scenarios for UHI and OTC analysis, and address questions such as:

• What is the impact of future urban development on the urban climate?
• How can urban heat in Singapore be effectively mitigated?
• What is the relationship between major anthropogenic heat sources and the urban climate?
• What differences are there in mitigation approaches between the larger-scale UHI effect, and smaller scale OTC issues in Singapore?

Cooling Singapore 2.0 builds on the results of previous research projects Cooling Singapore 1.0 and Cooling Singapore 1.5.

This research is supported by the National Research Foundation, Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore under its ‘Cooling Singapore 2.0 Funding Initiative’.

On 7 February 2020, SGX moved away from the quarterly reporting (QR) requirement for issuers with market capitalization of more than S$75 million and replaced it with a risk-based approach. Specifically, only issuers that are deemed risky (based on the criteria outlined by SGX) are required to perform quarterly reporting. Other issuers are required to only perform semi-annual reporting, but they are encouraged to voluntarily provide business updates or financial statements. Through this project, we will study the consequences of this new requirement from the perspectives of issuers, investors, and other stakeholders.

Software developers often make use of a method called satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) for program testing, analysis and verification. Unfortunately, SMT has its limitations as it is ineffective for large software that are usually more complicated. As such, the collaborative project with Huawei, aims to develop new constraint solving techniques based on optimization to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of testing and formal verification of software, so that it can be used on large software as well.

This project seeks to understand the scale and profile of family transfers to and from ageing Singaporeans. Specifically, the availability and scale of family financial transfers across generations, socioeconomic groups, family size, communities and individual factors will be studied through analysis of relevant data in the Singapore Life Panel®.