This project is an interdisciplinary and multi-institute work package, led by SMU, making use of the Digital Urban Climate Twin (DUCT) results from the first Cooling Singapore 2.0 work package to examine the urban climate risks and impacts from environmental and physiological perspectives. The objectives include (a.) investigating where and who in Singapore will be affected by excessive heat from urbanisation and climate change, and (b.) examining if existing measures, such as vegetation cover, will have reduced effectiveness in minimising heat exposure under a warming climate. Results from this project will aid in assessment and future policy development towards urban warmth solutions in Singapore.
This project studies a way to efficiently bootstrap graph neural networks (GNN), a deep learning technique on graphs. A graph (also called network) contains different entities, which are further linked based on their interactions, to form complex networks. However, to achieve optimal performance, for each graph and analytics task, GNNs require a large amount of task-specific labels, which are example cases happened in the past. Such labels are often unavailable or expensive to collect in large scale. In contrast, label-free graphs (i.e., graphs without task-specific labels) are more readily available in various domains. To overcome this critical limitation, the project team turn to GNN pre-training, which can efficiently bootstrap GNNs using label-free graphs and only a small amount of task-specific labels, to capture intrinsic graph properties that can be generalized across tasks and graphs in a domain. Practical applications of this research include fraud detection and anti-money laundry on financial networks, container demand and shipping prediction on supply chain networks and talent match on job/skill graphs.
To better understand gender gaps in opportunities and outcomes in the workplace, the team plans to examine the prevalence, causes, and potential remedies of gender discrimination across three organizational contexts. Part 1 of the project will focus on causes of discrimination in the selection of candidates for jobs and promotions. Part 2 will focus on performance evaluations, specifically how decision-makers may react differently to female and male employees who make errors on the job. Part 3 will examine the underlying reasons for gender gaps in negotiation outcomes as well as strategies to help promote fairer outcomes in compensation discussions.
The mechanism design literature hinges upon several assumptions, including (1) strategic sophistication - the ability of the individuals to think in complex ways, and (2) detailed knowledge of the environment. While these assumptions are standard in mechanism design, they are nevertheless very strong. “Real-life'' economic agents are not as rational as typically modeled. When agents have limited strategic sophistication, economists lose confidence in the performance of mechanisms that force participants to engage in complicated mental tasks. Furthermore, in realistic settings, the designer typically does not have detailed knowledge of the environment. Thus, a mechanism that performs well under strong assumptions of the environment might perform poorly when these assumptions turn out not to be true. The projects we propose here aim to further the understanding of mechanism design when the above-mentioned assumptions are relaxed.
The project aims to identify the nature of China’s influence on the international law governing the high seas. This research will comprehensively examine China’s strategies to expand its impact on global ocean governance in an era of geopolitical and environmental change. The project is expected to generate new knowledge for better understanding of China’s approaches to international law of the sea.
Modern Singapore is internationally renowned as a ‘Garden City’. Firmly entrenched in the official narrative as a linchpin of its national and global identities, the imagery of a verdant city-state serves as a reflection of Singapore’s economic prosperity along with the success of its governance model. Though largely attributable to the state-led greening campaign initiated in 1967 by Lee Kuan Yew, public parks, formal gardens, and roadside trees do not constitute the entirety of Singapore’s rich gardening heritage as a ‘Garden City’. Indeed, according to a survey conducted by the National Parks Board, approximately one in two respondents cultivate plants at home. Found in a wide range of residential and public settings, edible vernacular gardens are tightly interwoven into the fabric of everyday life as stylistically informal small-scale green spaces, cultivated by individuals and communities.
Spanning approximately two hundred years of Singapore’s modern history, this study will draw upon a wide array of textual and non-textual historical and contemporary sources to document gardening in Singapore from the 19th century to the present day. It will identify the ways in which historical gardening practices in Singapore have been continued, reinforced, and transformed into the contemporary period through building a body of new research and knowledge. In doing so, our proposed study will reflect an increased focus on ICH as part of the Our SG Heritage Plan and catalyze the writing of a new environmental history of Singapore, one which places ordinary people and practices in the foreground.
This collaboration develops “Sustainability and Commercial Law in Asia” as a focus area of research for the SMU Centre for Commercial Law in Asia, seeking to investigate the relationship between sustainability and commercial law developments in Asia and to propose suggestions for review and reform where appropriate.
Digital wellbeing has arisen in public, governmental and policy discourse as a key measure of a person’s wellbeing through a healthy use of technology. This project aims to identify and measure digital wellbeing for digital readiness, inclusion and safety. Building on the Digital Wellbeing Indicator Framework (DWIF) developed by researchers at the NUS Centre for Trusted Internet and Community, this project will test, evaluate, and revise the DWIF by conducting both qualitative and quantitative analysis of data collected from local context (i.e, Singapore) and global contexts (ie, UK, US, China), with specific focus on mainstream job trends (digital readiness), minority disability access (digital inclusion) and women (digital safety).
This project will develop a new approach, named MINIMA, for protecting end users against privacy and security risks in mobile operating systems. The success of this project can lead to an effective strategy to allow citizens to better protect themselves against cyber threats by minimising their individual attack surface.
The objective of the study is to design automated metrics for evaluating the clarity and readability of judgments and to empirically evaluate how well the judgments written by Singapore judges perform on those measures. Having the ability to define and evaluate judgments on these measures can assist judgment writers (judges and judicial law clerks) to draft clearer and more readable judgments.