Imagine if Amazon Alexa could recommend a tub of ice cream or Siri could play a cheerful song if they hear sadness in your voice. AI voice recognition can now recognise emotions with very high accuracy. Yet it is not correct all the time, and this begs the question of how it make its decisions.

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As COVID crept across the world, confining people to their homes and chaining them to their desks — for work, school, and play — Zhao Shengdong was no exception. Involved in class after online class, the associate professor at NUS Computing and his PhD student Ashwin Ram soon began to wonder: What can we do to enhance the online learning experience? Instead of a static setting, could people learn dynamically on-the-go instead? 

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‘EPP’ is an acronym that rolls easily off the tongue, and is something that all first-year Computer Engineering undergraduates at NUS are intimately familiar with. Short for ‘Engineering Principles and Practice,’ EPP is a course that spans two semesters — the first focuses on electronics and hardware, while the latter has a software emphasis.

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In recent years, some companies, including Amazon, JP Morgan, and Unilever, began asking prospective employees to do a curious thing — to film themselves answering a fixed set of questions. The firms would then run the videos through an AI-powered software, scanning faces and eye movements for signs of empathy, dependability, and other ‘desirable’ personality traits.

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Roger Zimmermann has been in the business for a long time — nearly 25 years to be precise. He first started studying media streaming in the late 1990s, as a young, earnest PhD student at the University of Southern California.

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It’s a pandemic-era feeling we’re all familiar with — you’re listening to a colleague on Zoom or attending an e-learning course...when your mind starts to wander. How many emails do I have to send once this is over? What shall I have for dinner tonight? Can I squeeze in a quick workout before that? The list goes on.

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When Jungpil Hahn was appointed head of the Department of Information Systems and Analytics at NUS Computing in 2015, it changed his perspective on many things.

“I began to see the broader picture of the discipline as a whole, and began to think holistically about what we are teaching and what we are missing in the overall curriculum,” recalls Associate Professor Hahn. “That’s when I saw the urgency and extent of the problem.”

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Technology has been a boon to our lives in so many ways. At dinner with friends and can’t agree who Jennifer Aniston is currently married to? A couple of taps on your smartphone and Wikipedia will settle the debate for you. Have a craving for cream puffs? Send out an order on Deliveroo and you’ll get your Beard Papa’s in under 30 minutes. Want to find out what happens next on the Korean hospital drama you’re watching? Just click ‘Next episode.’

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Consider a programmer sitting at her desk, trying to fix an error in a software system. First, she had to determine what was causing the problem and trace its source to a specific location within the programme’s code. Then she has to speculate on strategies that would fix the error, and test various patches to the code to see which one worked best. The entire process — called debugging — is an incredibly laborious and time-consuming process. It’s one that has vexed computer programmers for years, and continues to do so today.

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When you’re ill, seeing the doctor is one thing. Getting your prescription filled is another. If you live in an industrialised country, you probably wouldn’t think twice about the latter — you walk into a pharmacy and there’s the medication you need.

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Choice is good, but sometimes having too much choice can be a bad thing. Just ask anyone who’s ever tried to delve into a new film on Netflix, discover new songs on Spotify, or search for a suitable toy to buy their niece on Amazon — the options seem endless and often paralysing.

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In 2014, Tan Tianhui was in the second year of her PhD at NUS Computing when she heard about a “special product” that everyone back home in China couldn’t stop talking about.

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The International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) is one of the most prestigious competitions in the computer science world. Held every summer since 1987, the tournament sees exceptional high school students from over 80 countries gather to test their programming and problem-solving skills.

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The School of Computing at NUS is set in tranquil surroundings — buildings atop gentle hills are connected by breezy walkways, and research labs and classrooms look out onto lush tropical vegetation. In recent months, however, the views have been tainted by an eyesore: a monstrous construction site.

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To get to his office, Jun Han has to walk down a long windowless corridor. There are office rooms on either side, but the doors are often closed, making the whole thing “quite hollow.” One day, as Han was unlocking his door and his key made a droop sound when it entered the lock, a thought crossed his mind: “Wow, this is really loud.”

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There have been many moments of disbelief throughout the pandemic, but one of the most shocking ones happened last April, when then U.S. President Donald Trump suggested that disinfectants could be a cure for Covid-19.

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To say that the human body is an intricate complicated system would be an understatement. When one thing goes wrong, others often follow suit. So in 1970 when Alvan Feinstein first coined the term ‘comorbidity’ — to refer to a person having multiple diseases at the same time — it wasn’t too revolutionary a concept.

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How can you get your next great idea? One way is to ask other people, and many of them, even a crowd. Crowdsourcing — harnessing the wisdom of the crowd to attain a common goal — is used for an impressive array of tasks, from learning how to eat sustainably, to redesigning cities with open government, creating apps with hackathons, and annotating data for machine learning. When you need help in such instances, you are almost guaranteed to find a ready army of volunteers online.

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In 1961, something momentous happened at a squat, nondescript factory in the tiny town of Ewing, New Jersey. The Unimate, a robotic arm, was fired up for the first time, grabbing pieces of hot metal off an assembly line and welding them onto car bodies while onlookers cheered — the world’s first industrial robot had officially been put to work.

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Every decade has an exercise trend or two that defines it. Step aerobics and the Thighmaster were popular in the ‘90s, for instance, while exer-gaming and CrossFit were all the craze in the 2000s. To know what’s trending this decade, look no further than your wrist (or to those around you) — chances are it’ll be adorned with some sort of wearable device, fitness tracker, or smartwatch.

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