External Research Grants

Climate change is an increasingly urgent and existential crisis that threatens all sectors of society in all countries of Southeast Asia. The Climate Transformation Programme aims to develop, inspire and accelerate knowledge-based solutions and educate future leaders to establish the stable climate and environment necessary for resilient, just, and sustainable Southeast Asian societies. CTP will generate knowledge and innovation across disciplines including climate and Earth science, ecology, materials science, artificial intelligence, humanities, social sciences and the arts, finance, health, and engineering. It will also translate state-of-the-art scientific results into real world solutions for Singapore, and it will transfer these solutions to Southeast Asia and beyond.

CTP will help to better understand exactly how the climate is changing; to identify and develop ways to contribute to global climate change mitigation efforts; to better assess the environmental, social, and economic risks from climate change; and to design effective solutions to control, reduce and adapt to these risks. 

To achieve these multiple objectives, CTP will integrate a matrix of six strategic clusters of research and three cross-cutting themes, where Sonny Rosenthal will participate in and contribute to Cross Cutting Theme 1: Sustainable societies.

(Cross Cutting Theme 1: Sustainable societies will leverage climate research in communication, public opinion and psychology, and artistic impressions to shape public attitudes and behaviours.)

The project aims to enhance the understanding of the legal and economic aspects of sustainability-related trade, investment, and financial relations between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries and Taiwan.

Through this project, the team will investigate the relationship between the extent of use of technology by Singapore- and Australia-based accountants and their work productivity. In examining the relationship, the team will focus on two causal mechanisms: (1) technology distracting accountants from their core tasks and (2) the over-dependence on technology by accountants.

This research seeks to investigate cultural factors that shape people’s tendency to engage in zero-sum thinking. Uncovering novel antecedents of zero-sum thinking is not only theoretically important but can also help generate interventions to temporarily lower zero-sum thinking when cooperation is vital.

This research project aims to study the working preferences of older Singaporeans and understand their perceptions towards upskilling, reskilling and the types of employment that may be meaningful for them. The results from this research are expected to shed insights and inform the design of a jobs-skills-learning recommender, the SkillsFuture Career Transition Programme (SCTP) and other services and facilities catered to older adults’ needs.

(This is additional funding to SMU for the existing research project.) 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. 

Through this project, the team will design and conduct a research study that aims to meet the following objectives: (1) to understand the salary trends and progression of accountants and/or accountancy graduates by showcasing the salary of accountancy job roles and/or salary trend of accountancy graduates over the years, and (2) to illustrate accountancy as the ticket to diverse careers by showcasing the enriching jobs across various industries through sharing of stories by ISCA members.

A trusted digital identity is an essential component for securely and conveniently accessing services and authorizing transactions in cyberspace. With the rapid development of decentralized technologies and applications, such as distributed ledgers, Web3, and decentralized finance, there is an urging demand for decentralized digital identities (DID), also known as self-sovereign identities, which empower end users to create, own and govern their digital identities and assets in an autonomous, reliable, and privacy-preserving manner. The overarching goal of this project is to develop and implement a trusted, versatile, reliable and user centric DID framework covering a complete DID lifecycle. Specifically, the project aims to investigate novel techniques for enabling key components and features that are either missing or inadequately addressed in the existing DID proposals. This research is supported by the National Research Foundation, Singapore and Infocomm Media Development Authority under its Trust Tech Funding Initiative.

This project focuses on “human capital development” that involves, as one of its core pillars, the ability to use AI to improve learning. Through this project, the SMU Research team will work with the MIT team to build up key AI based models for supporting interactive learning by supporting natural multi-modal question answering associated with learning tasks. The SMU team will also develop initial prototypes that embed such interactive learning in online learning platforms.

This project focuses on “immersive workplaces” that involve extensive and interactive co-working by humans and AI-enhanced agents/robots. The research will investigate techniques to combine the latent cognitive state of a human worker, with explicit instructions issued by humans using a natural mix of visual, verbal and gestural cues, to build powerful new capabilities for human-robot co-working in immersive workplaces and industrial settings. The SMU Research team will develop optimized AI models, as well as prototype pervasive systems, that allow a variety of robotic agents to disambiguate, comprehend and respond to commands issued by human workers.