Predicting public opinion, preserving historical texts: New NUS centre marries humanities with AI
In an interview with The Straits Times, Professor Atreyi Kankanhalli (NUS Computing) and Associate Professor Miguel Escobar Varela (NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences) shared insights on the new NUS Centre for Computational Social Science and Humanities (CSSH) – a collaboration between NUS Computing and NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.
Professor Atreyi described CSSH as “a matchmaker and a facilitator for interdisciplinary work”, supporting collaborations that address complex societal challenges.
CSSH brings together machine learning, natural language processing ad humanities scholarship in a deeply interdisciplinary effort to tackle questions that sit at the heart of society.
Projects featured in the article include an AI-driven platform that simulates public responses to proposed policies – helping to stress-test ideas related to heritage conservation and preventive health – as well as AI tools that transliterate pre-1970s Malay newspapers written in Jawi into searchable text, preserving Singapore’s multilingual heritage.