External Research Grants

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.

A recommender system presents a personalized experience to each user. One perennial issue affecting current recommendation technologies is the sparsity of data related to user preferences. The overall objective of this proposed research is to address this sparsity problem by a combination of approaches that together enable lifelong learning for recommender systems. This is done by allowing the recommendation model to evolve over time to new users and items and, to transfer over to new product categories. In addition, the proposed recommendation model would have the ability to cross from a source platform that accumulates longer-term preferences to a target platform that seeks to integrate short-term signals and reinforcement learning. This provides a system that is able to learn from longer-term preferences and provide the necessary flexibility for cross platform applications.

This research is an ideation/proof of concept project to develop an interactive Web application, called Slide++, which allows students to self-explore additional content related to their courses, while still being directed by the lesson materials provided by an instructor. Importantly, its primary feature is to provide content augmentation for every slide in the form of learning resources relevant to the slide being viewed. These resources can be of various modalities, including Web pages, videos, or questions and answers (Q&A’s).

This project aims to build an Automatic Programming Coaching system that is based on a combination of AI and software engineering techniques to support students practice coding via formative feedback generation.

This project aims to create a 13-week undergraduate elective module to help final-year students achieve one of the graduate learning outcomes of Singapore Management University (SMU): “personal mastery” as a driver of holistic learning in pursuit of both personal and collective well-being. This project will translate the existing program “Mindfulness-based Strategic Awareness Training” for working professionals into the context of tertiary education. Expanding this program to incorporate academic discussion and group work, the course will be the first tertiary-level intervention to combine mindfulness practice with positive psychology to help participants move from suffering to flourishing.