A few years ago, Yair Zick was attending a conference in Stockholm when he struck up a conversation with two researchers from the University of Southern California (USC). Zick, a computer scientist from NUS Computing, was investigating how the concepts of fairness and diversity could be applied to allocating public housing flats in Singapore. The USC researchers, Bryan Wilder and Milind Tambe, were interested in Zick’s work because they were trying to solve a resource allocation problem of their own.

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A child wearing a red ski-suit

The shiny, black robotic arm gleamed as it whirred into action and ‘waved’ at us, accompanied by Alexa’s robotic, yet (somehow) cheery, disembodied greeting, “Hello! My name is MICO.” Mohit Shridhar stretched his lanky frame across the counter to place plastic replicas of a few everyday objects—a red bowl, an apple, and a banana—on the white tablecloth in front of MICO. Then Shridhar instructed, “Alexa, tell MICO to pick up the apple.” The robotic arm contorted and whirred until it held its gripper over the apple. “Do you mean this?” Alexa asked. “Alexa, tell MICO to go ahead,” Shridhar confirmed. MICO obediently, albeit mechanically, lowered its gripper and picked up the apple.

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No matter how many times you’ve flown, sitting at the window seat and watching the world shrink away from view as the plane takes off never seems to grow old. Towering trees and skyscrapers become mere pixels, roads and rivers now thin winding ribbons, and vast tracts of land appear as tiny thumbnails below.

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From investigating the probability of losing jobs to artificial intelligence (AI), to the benefits of pop-up ads—here are the recent research breakthroughs by the Department of Information Systems and Analytics, presented at the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) 2019.

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Hospital visits can be complicated things. Sometimes it starts out as a visit to the outpatient clinic, where a doctor draws blood or orders some scans to investigate your niggling concern. He phones you the following week with the results — they don’t look good — and schedules a minor operation. You get admitted, have the procedure, and get discharged with tablets and therapy to follow up.

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In Greek mythology, Erebus is the primeval god of darkness, son of Chaos. It’s also the region of the underworld, where souls pass through after dying. The word is so evocative of gloom and shadows that naming one of the most dangerous types of Bitcoin attacks after it seems only fitting.

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This is a scenario that’s probably familiar to many of us: You touch down at your long-awaited holiday destination, collect your luggage, and step outside the airport, raring to go. Now you need to find your way to the Airbnb, so you whip out your phone and plug the address into Google Maps. Or Apple Maps, or Waze, or MapQuest, or Maps.Me, or HERE WeGo.

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If you’ve ever had an MRI done, you would know that it’s not the most comfortable experience. They can make you feel claustrophobic, you’ll often hear loud thumping or tapping noises, and you might have to hold your breath a couple of times. But for most people, the hardest thing about getting an MRI, or magnetic resonance imagining, scan is being forced to stay completely still — sometimes for up to 90 minutes at a time.

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It is no simple feat to have a research paper accepted at a top tier computer science conference – let alone to achieve this as an undergraduate student. For recent Computer Science graduate Tang Yew Siang, what started out as an opportunity to learn about research turned into an accepted paper at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), one of the top computer science conferences.

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These days, it seems that whenever you’re thirsty and in need of a quick caffeine pick-me-up, there’s always a Starbucks close by — whether you’re running errands locally in the Singapore heartlands of Bedok, or climbing the Badaling section of the Great Wall of China. Starbucks’ ubiquity isn’t just a figment of your imagination, it’s a fact backed by the firm’s latest sales figures.

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They say that in the future, vehicles will be able to talk. Not in the way that those in the Pixar movie “Cars” do, but more in the sense of being able to relay and receive information from surrounding vehicles, buildings, traffic lights, and other infrastructure.

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From driverless cars to life-saving medical devices and everything in between, the technologies of the future not only promise to change the world, but also to create high-paying jobs and drive economic growth in the countries where they are developed and commercialised. With so much at stake, it’s no wonder that many countries are racing to build the innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystems that make this possible.

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Our brain can easily estimate the 3D position and the orientation of the objects we see. This task, however, is non-trivial for computers and robots. Computer scientists have been working on the problem of recovering the 3D position and orientation of objects in data captured from image sensors for years. This problem, formulated as the ‘pose estimation’ problem, is important because recovering the position and orientation of objects in a scene is often a necessary step to understanding the scene.

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Remember when your piano teacher used to insist you practise your scales every single day? Turns out she wasn’t just being a tyrannical tormentor, but a firm believer in the old adage “practice makes perfect.”

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In 1958, a curious sight began appearing on the sidewalks of California. People were taking apart roller skates, attaching them to the underside of wooden planks, sometimes boxes, and whizzing down the streets.

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Mention “Bayesian Optimisation” to Professor Bryan Low Kian Hsiang and he begins to talk about baking cookies. That’s because to the uninitiated, concepts such as “distributed batch Gaussian process optimisation” and “decentralised high-dimensional Bayesian optimisation” can sound either downright intimidating or like pure gobbledygook.

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With science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) skills in greater demand than ever before, many people see STEM education as a ticket to a successful and rewarding career. University graduates with STEM degrees tend to land jobs quickly, and also command some of the highest starting salaries in Singapore, according to data from Singapore's Ministry of Education.

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For those who’ve taken the plunge into the world of wearable devices — 61 million of us by the year’s end, as estimates predict — the leap can be liberating.

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At some point in our careers, most of us have to deal with an IT system that is clunky, unreliable, or just plain difficult to use. It might have an unintuitive interface that takes forever to learn. Or it might require an unnecessarily mind-numbing sequence of steps for every minor task that it facilitates, only to crash every time that task is just a few clicks from completion.

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Have you ever struggled to learn a new language? Maybe you should spend less time trying to speak it and start singing instead!

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