Every semester, Francis Yeoh spends part of his time in pitch slams. These are intense sessions where teams of students have five minutes to try and sell their start-up ideas. Yeoh, the Professorial Fellow for Entrepreneurship at the NUS School of Computing, and his colleagues listen carefully to the pitches before deciding which teams are worthy of a $10,000 grant.

Stéphane Bressan and Christian Miniatura grew up in rival neighbourhoods of the naval garrison town of Toulon in southern France. They went to the same high school and the same college only a few years apart, but never were acquainted until 2006 when they were both working halfway across the world, at the National University of Singapore. Miniatura and Bressan became fast friends, meeting regularly to “put the world to rights” over French food and wine.

“One of our favourite debates was whether artificial intelligence can be useful to quantum physics,” says Bressan, an associate professor at the School of Computing. He was convinced that AI could lend a helping hand in solving some of physics’ longstanding problems. But Miniatura, a quantum physicist by training and the director of the Franco-Singaporean physics laboratory MajuLab, remained perplexed albeit intrigued at the possibility.

These days, we live and buy by online reviews. Looking for a pair of headphones? Wondering what movie to stream or if you should splash out for the new PlayStation 5? Or perhaps you need a hotel to stay in and suggestions for the best baby back ribs in town? Well look no further than the Internet, for someone somewhere will surely have a recommendation to offer about the product, service or facility you are thinking of.

Life has a funny way of leading people down paths they least expect. Just ask NUS Computing lecturer Boyd Anderson. Two years ago, Anderson, then a PhD student, found himself at Mustafa Centre, a 24-hour mall in the heart of Singapore’s Little India district. It was 3 a.m., and Anderson was throwing what seemed to be a random assortment of things into a shopping cart: a hot glue gun, Velcro tape, disposable socks, and 12 pairs of sneakers, each a different size.