All CS in the Media
16 October 2026
The US and China recently agreed to open a dialogue on AI risks and safety incidents, even as both race to lead the field. Speaking to 焦点, Professor Anthony Tung from the Department of Computer Science explained where the real danger lies.
AI agents that can write code could spread through systems much like a virus, he said, bringing down banks and hospital equipment, and people could die as a result. The threat to humanity comes when AI is connected to nuclear controls or biological weapons. “Frontier or not, connecting AI to weapons isn’t a good idea,” said Prof Tung. Even a modest system only has to make one wrong decision.
He also compared the two countries’ approaches. A frontier model that slips out of control could do great harm. Open-source models tend to stay within a controllable range, but once they’re released, nobody can stop others building something stronger on top of them. “Each approach carries its own dangers,” he said.
Prof Tung’s suggestion goes against the industry’s race for scale. Today’s neural networks are black boxes, he noted, in the same way we can’t see how the brain makes its decisions. Many other AI systems are transparent about how they work and how they reach a decision. Smaller, more transparent AI of this kind would be “a lot safer”.
15 September 2026
Professor Anthony Tung from NUS Computing was quoted in The Business Times on 15 September on what a slowdown in AI development would need to look like in practice, and where Singapore fits in.
The article followed an essay by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calling for a slower pace of AI capability development, backed by third-party evaluators, common safety standards and coordination between governments. Prof Tung, who is also AI lead for urban sustainability at the NUS AI Institute, said what is currently missing is rules with teeth: there are no agreed conditions for when an AI lab should stop, or what evidence should allow it to proceed. His suggestion is that a lab release a capability only as fast as accredited independent evaluators can assess it, so that the pace is set by evaluation throughput rather than by a competitor's release schedule. He cautioned that obligations should scale with risk, as a one-size-fits-all approach risks entrenching the very frontier labs regulation is meant to restrain.
On Singapore's position, Prof Tung noted that accreditation under schemes such as AI Verify establishes that a tester is competent within a defined scope, not that an AI system is safe. He pointed to a gap in how software safety, cybersecurity and AI safety are treated as separate disciplines with separate funding and regulators, even as incidents increasingly span all three, and suggested Singapore set up an institute with a mandate across all three areas. "A slowdown on its own is not a safety policy," he said, adding that the time gained has to be invested in better evaluation, stronger safeguards and more resilient systems around AI.
3 September 2026
This episode of Ethiroli examined the growing threat of deepfake-enabled scams, with a particular focus on elderly victims targeted through investment fraud schemes circulated on messaging platforms. The segment covered why why elderly viewers are disproportionately affected, alongside broader risks, including fake explicit content targeting younger users and fraudulent business impersonation.
Dr Prahbu Natarajan from the Department of Computer Science shared practical detection methods, including listening for audio inconsistencies when comparing suspect clips against known genuine recordings. The programme also featured a live demonstration by Associate Professor Terence Sim, who showed how convincingly a video and voice can be fabricated using a short audio sample, reinforcing the segment's message that deepfake creation now requires minimal technical skill.
Vasantham Ethiroli (2 September): S23 Ep 21 Deepfake: The New Face of Deception
2 September 2026
Four Computers Science undergraduates from NUS Computing were featured in The Straits Times for AHMA, an AI-powered app designed to help caregivers in Singapore find support services that match their needs.
Aishwarya Goyal, Hazel Low, Abhishek Paranjape and Andrew Soon began the project at a hackathon in 2025, drawing on their own experience caring for grandparents and supporting friends through mental health difficulties. Speaking to ST, Abhishek described the gap the team chose to work on as resource navigation: Singapore's social service agencies and government schemes offer a great deal to caregivers, but many struggle to work out which options apply to them.
AHMA uses a voice interface as its primary mode of interaction, a choice the team made with older caregivers in mind. A user can speak to the app about their situation and receive encouragement along with pointers to relevant community organisations. It currently supports English, Malay and Mandarin, and the team is working on adding dialects. The text-to-speech model was trained on Aishwarya's voice so that it sounds familiar to Singaporean users.
The students have been gathering feedback from caregivers, including at a recent session run by Mindfull Community, a non-profit that supports caregivers and families of people with mental health conditions. Hazel told ST that co-creating with caregivers is central to how the team works. Mindfull's deputy head of partnerships, Samantha Foo, said the sessions were valuable for both sides, and that the organisation intends to review the app once a working version is ready.
The team plans to launch a working product in the coming months.
7 August 2026
Associate Professor Terence Sim from the Department of Computer Science joined CNA938 #TalkBack segment on facial recognition technology in public transport, prompted by the closed trial now underway at Punggol Coast MRT Station.
Host Daniel Martin put the question to Prof Sim, whose research spans biometric authentication and facial recognition: can a system built to verify one face at a time handle a gantry at rush hour?
Prof Sim's answer centred on throughput. Similar systems already run in cities such as Beijing, Osaka and Moscow, but Singapore's population is more racially diverse than most, and that diversity exposes a known weak point. "It's been found that darker skin tones cause problems for the systems, elderly women tend to have difficulty, and of course children, because their facial structure changes rapidly," he said, adding that headgear, masks and even a fresh shave can throw off a match against someone's enrolled image.
Average daily MRT ridership hit 3.49 million trips in 2025, according to the latest LTA statistics, concentrated in evening bursts between 5pm and 7pm, a volume far beyond any office facial recognition deployment. Prof Sim outlined three ways such a system can fail: false positives, false negatives, and misidentification, where one enrolled commuter is charged for another's ride. Citing the best error rates he could find, he estimated roughly 10,500 people could be barred from the gate daily, and about 1,750 could be wrongly charged for someone else's trip.
His conclusion: lighting, crowding and privacy concerns mean facial recognition technology is unlikely to replace tapping outright.
Listen to the full segment: CNA938 Rewind - #TalkBack (6 Aug): Is facial recognition effective for public transport?
5 August 2026
The Straits Times covered the launch of the Razer-NUS Joint AI Research Lab on 5 August, reporting on the lab's role in advancing AI models that support both in-game and real-life tasks.
The article detailed how research from the lab will feed into two Razer products. The first is AVA, a 3D holographic desk companion first shown at CES 2026, which uses camera and microphone sensors to manage schedules, offer reminders and assist with gaming. Razer's chief strategy officer Li-Meng Lee described the ambition as moving digital companions "to the next level" beyond earlier concepts like Tamagotchi. The second is Project Motoko, a wearable AI headset that scans a user's surroundings to provide contextual advice, positioning Razer against wearables from Meta and Google.
The piece reported that the lab, based at NUS, will house around 20 PhD and postdoctoral researchers with direct access to Razer's engineering team for real-world validation and product integration. Both parties will jointly fund operations and jointly own resulting intellectual property.
Associate Professor Ooi Wei Tsang, co-director of the lab, was quoted describing the collaboration as charting "the pathway towards next-generation intelligent systems that will shape the future of interactive gaming experiences."
5 August 2026
A two-storey standalone building on the NUS campus now houses the Razer-NUS Joint AI Research Lab, marking Razer's first joint research lab with a university under a three-year partnership, per Lianhe Zaobao's 5 August report on the launch.
NUS Associate Professor Ooi Wei Tsang, co-director of the lab, told the paper the team comprises around 20 members, mostly from the NUS School of Computing, including three professors and a number of PhD students and researchers. He named the lab's near-term research priorities as reducing latency in human-machine interaction and improving machine memory to enable more personalised responses, with potential applications extending to fields such as autonomous driving.
NUS PhD student Yu Zhaochen, a member of the research team, pointed to a current limitation of AI gaming tools in the report: in-game content updates continuously, while an AI assistant's knowledge base does not always keep pace, which can make its guidance outdated.
Razer and NUS data cited in the piece projects the global gaming AI market growing from US$4.2 billion (approximately S$5.4 billion) in 2025 to US$66.8 billion by 2035, alongside a Microsoft survey finding that close to 80 per cent of gamers would accept at least one AI feature they believe would improve their gaming experience.
5 August 2026
Never about making money in the first place" is how Razer's chief strategy officer Li-Meng Lee described the company's investment logic behind the new Razer-NUS Joint AI Research Lab, in the Business Times' 5 August piece framing the partnership through Razer's broader push to build a software and AI layer around its hardware business.
The Razer-NUS Joint AI Research Lab will draw on NUS' AI research capabilities and Razer's product expertise to explore what the article termed gaming artificial narrow intelligence (GANI), a category of AI models built for interactive digital environments. Applications cited included generating context-aware objectives and dialogue during gameplay, and adjusting difficulty in live matches to sustain engagement and fairness.
The lab houses 15 to 20 researchers from the NUS School of Computing, with Razer staff supporting projects on an ad hoc basis. Three research pillars were named: core model innovation, real-time content systems, and advanced personalisation.
NUS Associate Professor Ooi Wei Tsang, director of the research lab, was quoted on the division of contributions: "NUS brings the smarts, the talent, the pipeline to help build what we're trying to envision here. What Razer brings is real-world adoption of these use cases." The article confirmed intellectual property arising from the research will be jointly owned by Razer and NUS.
Market research firm InsightAce Analytic projects the value of AI in gaming will grow from US$4.2 billion in 2025 to US$66.8 billion by 2035, a figure cited in the piece.
3 August 2026
Professor Anthony Tung from the Department of Computer Science was interviewed on CNA938 Rewind, where he spoke with host Daniel Martin about the CNA investigation uncovering AI-generated videos using Alibaba founder Jack Ma's likeness to spread falsehoods about Singapore.
Prof Tung noted that the capability isn't new, and what has changed is accessibility – these tools now run on an ordinary desktop, which puts them beyond the reach of platform-level safeguards. "It's not that difficult to do it on a local machine, your own desktop, nowadays," he said.
Prof Tung shared that his research group's focus has shifted accordingly. Rather than trying to stem the flood of AI-generated misinformation at the source, the team is working on what he called a "safety jacket" for end users. "This is a flood of misinformation. Our research is how to build a safety jacket for them; we're not trying to stop the flood anymore."
28 July 2026
Professor Anthony Tung from the Department of Computer Science weighed in on a CNA investigation that uncovered over 300 AI-generated videos using Jack Ma's likeness to spread falsehoods about Singapore, amassing more than a million views combined. Prof Tung explained why viewers keep watching content they half-suspect is synthetic, and why "detection does not equal rejection".
20 July 2026
CNA's investigation, "Loophole lets Singapore Pools app users place bets from overseas – despite rules against it," found that the Singapore Pools app can be accessed and used to place bets outside Singapore, despite rules confining betting to within the country.
CNA tested the app in the UK and Italy during the World Cup and placed bets successfully, and seven users described similar workarounds from countries including Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan and China dating back to 2020, all via roaming data on Singapore telcos. The Gambling Regulatory Authority confirmed operators are required to restrict betting to users physically in Singapore, and Singapore Pools said it uses geofencing and residency checks, though it did not comment on the loophole itself.
Professor Chan Mun Choon, who directs the NUS-NCS Joint Laboratory for Cyber Security, explained the technical mechanism: mobile roaming can route traffic so an overseas user appears to be connecting from a Singapore IP address, even while physically elsewhere. He noted that telcos cannot always determine an internet traffic's true origin, which puts the onus on app owners to build in further safeguards, such as combining IP checks with GPS-based geolocation.
17 June 2026
Professor Anthony Tung from the Department of Computer Science appeared on 狮城有约 (Hello Singapore) to analyse the wave of tech giant IPOs – from SpaceX's record-breaking public offering to the anticipated listings of OpenAI and Anthropic – and what they signal for investor and everyday AI users.
On SpaceX's extraordinary market reception, Prof Tung pointed to something more durable than hype: a long track record of delivering on technically ambitious promises. Rocket recovery technology, once widely dismissed as impractical, has become routine – and that execution credibility, he argued, is what gives investors real confidence. He also noted that SpaceX's integrated hardware-software model gives it a structural edge over pure software players, enabling rapid deployment of AI into physical devices and robotic systems.
As AI companies prepare to meet capital market expectations, Prof Tung pushed back on the assumption that monetisation pressure would trigger a price war. With open-source models and localised solutions already a significant part of the ecosystem, he argued that competition is more likely to play out on accuracy, safety, and functionality than on cost alone. On OpenAI's reported move towards advertising revenue, he observed this follows a well-worn path for internet businesses: free users may see more ads, while paying users gain a fuller, less interrupted experience.