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External Research Grants

CY 2024
Human workers and resource allocation optimization
Principal Investigator: Wang Hai
School of Computing and Information Systems
Funding Source: Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology
Project Synopsis: 

The objective of the proposed project is to explore, in close collaboration with a local air transport hub, the development, validation and testing of an integrated set of models, algorithms, and tools that will support the Stand Assignment Process, considering impacts on the activities and behavior of passengers within the terminals. The project will also assess the likely impacts of a new AI-based system on the range of affected stakeholders, involve managers and staff in the design process, and train them in the use and management of this technology. Similar use cases with a ride-hailing service provider will also be explored.

CY 2024
PresentationPro: Improving Public Speaking Skills through AI-Driven Virtual Reality Interactions
Principal Investigator: Shim Kyong Jin
School of Computing and Information Systems
Funding Source: Ministry of Education Tertiary Education Research Fund
Project Synopsis: 

This research project aims to leverage Virtual Reality (VR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve public speaking skills through immersive, real-world scenario simulations. The project seeks to develop a VR system with AI-driven avatars that respond dynamically to a presenter’s body language and speech, enhancing the learning experience by providing interactive and personalized feedback. It addresses the scalability and resource limitations of traditional public speaking training by offering a virtual environment where students can practice and refine their skills without the need for a physical audience. The research will explore PresentationPro's effectiveness in helping students achieve learning outcomes in university public speaking programs and equip them with key skills for the future workplace. By incorporating advanced AI, machine learning, and VR technologies, PresentationPro aims to provide a realistic and accessible virtual practice experience that reduces public speaking anxiety and improves performance. The project will be assessed through pilot studies focusing on learning outcomes, system usability, and the immediate applicability of training in real-world settings.

CY 2024
PromptTutor - Generative AI-enabled Personalised Tutor for Reflection Learning in Programming Courses
Principal Investigator: Ouh Eng Lieh
School of Computing and Information Systems
Funding Source: Ministry of Education Tertiary Education Research Fund
Project Synopsis: 

The objective of this project is to enhance students’ comprehension, retention, and overall learning outcomes in programming by leveraging AI-enabled PromptTutor. It aims to design an AI-enabled intervention that prompts students to reflect on their completed tasks, address doubts in their reflections, and provides additional learning resources in a personalised and timely manner.

CY 2023
AntiGen: Safeguarding Artistic and Personal Visual Data from Generative AI
Principal Investigator: He Shengfeng
School of Computing and Information Systems
Funding Source: AI Singapore's AI Governance Research Grant Call
Project Synopsis: 

In this digital age, advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have brought about both great opportunities and significant challenges. One of these challenges revolves around the protection of personal data, particularly digital images, which can be exploited by AI technologies. The proposal focuses on addressing these issues by developing solutions that can safeguard the digital rights of individuals and protect their creations from potential misuse by AI technologies. It offers a 'cloak of invisibility' to your digital images, rendering them unexploitable by AI while retaining their visual appeal for human observers. The project aims to return control to the individuals, ensuring the protection of their art and their privacy in the digital world. 

This research/project is supported by the National Research Foundation, Singapore under the AI Singapore Programme (AISG Award No: AISG3-GV-2023-011).

CY 2023
Tokenized Economy and Collaborative Intelligence for Web 3 Media Industry
Principal Investigator: Zhu Feida
School of Computing and Information Systems
Funding Source: Zeasn Technology Pte Ltd
Project Synopsis: 

ZEASN Technology is a global leader in smart TV solutions since 2011, and it is headquartered in Singapore with a strong global presence. ZEASN's flagship product, Whale OS, powers 90 million devices globally for over 300 brands. The collaborative research between SMU and ZEASN Technology Pte Ltd is dedicated to developing an advanced Web 3.0 creative media content ecosystem. Emphasizing critical aspects like tokenomics, incentive design, and privacy-enhancing computation, the project’s our primary goal is to construct a future-proof digital framework that is user-friendly, secure, and maximizes user participation, privacy, and profit. Anticipated outcomes include a robust, efficient, and scalable Web 3.0 creative media content ecosystem, maintaining user privacy while fostering a dynamic, tokenomics-driven creative space. This comprehensive approach seeks to revolutionize how creative media is created, shared, and monetized, empowering users and content creators in the digital era. Leveraging combined expertise from economics, computer science, and digital media, the team we aim to design an ecosystem aligned with the values of the Web 3.0 vision: decentralized, user-centric, and privacy-preserving. An early harvest of this collaboration is addressing key challenges in the century-old film industry, with plans for a Web3-powered virtual cinema on ZEASN's worldwide Whale OS CTVs, aiming to decentralize film distribution and monetization in a transparent and rewarding fashion.

CY 2023
Data-driven Optimisation and Artificial Intelligence for Future Fintech
Principal Investigator: WANG Hai
School of Computing and Information Systems
Funding Source: Tokka Labs Pte Ltd
Project Synopsis: 

The global fintech landscape is undergoing a pivotal shift at its core, driven in part by advanced AI techniques. This project aims to: (i) understand the inner workings of diverse investment systems to assess their transaction patterns; (ii) create algorithms that decode fintech data, offering insights and aiding in market behavior predictions; and (iii) leverage optimization and AI methods to enhance trading and transaction systems.

CY 2023
Sensors In-Home for Elder Wellbeing (SINEW)
Principal Investigator: Tan Ah Hwee
School of Computing and Information Systems
Funding Source: Sengkang General Hospital Pte Ltd
Project Synopsis: 

This project, led by A/Prof Iris Rawtaer (SKH) aims to utilise multimodal sensor networks for early detection of cognitive decline. Under this project, the SKH and NUS team will oversee the project operations, screening recruitment, psychometric evaluation, data analysis, data interpretation, reporting and answer of clinical research hypotheses. The SMU team will collaborate with SKH and NUS to provide technical expertise for this study by ensuring safe implementation and maintenance of the sensors in the homes of the participants, provide the sensor obtained data to the clinical team and apply artificial intelligence methods for predictive modelling.

CY 2023
Web 3 Security
Principal Investigator: Zhu Feida
School of Computing and Information Systems
Funding Source: Slowmist Pte Ltd
Project Synopsis: 

This project is set to advance the security landscape of emerging technologies in Web 3, including pattern and model-based fraud detection and knowledge graph-based reasoning, in order to address the various issues and chaos in the Web3 domain and establish a comprehensive set of compliance standards.

CY 2023
Acute workforce response to “Demand pulled” patient lifecycle data via Generative Flow Networks and Graph Neural Networks
Principal Investigator: Lau Hoong Chuin
School of Computing and Information Systems
Funding Source: AI Singapore
Project Synopsis: 

This is a project under the AI Singapore 100 Experiments Programme. The project focuses on the healthcare industry resource management where there is a complex relationship not just among the various manpower types (doctors, nurses) but also with the patient lifecycle leadtimes, geo-location, medical equipment and facility needed to perform surgeries and patient care. Manpower shortage has birthed conservative and static long-term planning solutions without considering these upstream data flows. In post-covid world today, this project could bring more potential solutions to the manpower allocation and development problem, especially when demand changes acutely. The project sponsor, BIPO Service (Singapore) Pte Ltd believes that an AI-driven, short-input-to-output cycle HR system streaming in “demand”-pulled patient lifecycle data can allocate and inform skills development not only for full time, but part time workforce.

This research/project is supported by the National Research Foundation, Singapore under its AI Singapore Programme (AISG Award No: AISG2-100E-2023-118).

CY 2023
ProExpan: Proactive Ontology Expansion for Conversational Agents
Principal Investigator: Liao Lizi
School of Computing and Information Systems
Funding Source: Ministry of Education’s Academic Research Fund Tier 2
Project Synopsis: 

Most conversational systems today are not very good at adapting to new or unexpected situations when serving the end user in a dynamic environment. Models trained on fixed training datasets often fail easily in practical application scenarios. Existing methods for the fundamental task of conversation understanding rely heavily on training slot-filling models with a predefined ontology. For example, given an utterance such as “book a table for two persons in Blu Kouzina,” the models classify it into one of the predetermined intents book-table, predict specific values such as “two persons” and “Blu Kouzina” to fill predefined slots number_of_people and restaurant_name, respectively. The agent’s inherent conversation ontology comprises these intents, slots, and corresponding values. When end users say things outside of the predefined ontology, the agent tends to misunderstand the utterance and may cause critical errors. The aim of this project is to investigate how conversational agents can proactively detect new intents, values, and slots, and expand their conversation ontology on-the-fly to handle unseen situations better during deployment.