Filtered by: Feature

Humans, Robots, and the Trust that binds them

12 March 2020 CSFEATURES Department of Computer Science , Faculty , Research , Feature , Artificial Intelligence

Like so many parts along the Californian coast, Honda Point is breathtakingly beautiful. People go to visit, but when they do, it’s not for the views.

Rather, they go to remember one of the darkest days in U.S. Naval history, when seven destroyers ran aground and twenty-three sailors perished. Lieutenant Commander Donald T. Hunter, who was in charge of navigating the ships from San Francisco to San Diego that day, relied primarily on the centuries-old technique of dead reckoning. A more accurate method called radio direction-finding (RFD) had been invented two years earlier, but Hunter was mistrustful of the new technology — a decision that would ultimately prove fatal.

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Online gifting and why we do it

04 March 2020 Department of Information Systems & Analytics , Faculty , Research , Feature , Data Science & Business Analytics , Digital Transformation, Platforms & Innovation

For many of us, the introduction of Facebook, WhatsApp, and other social media platforms was a game-changer. They altered the way we make and maintain friends, and transformed how we share news and updates with those we know. But for those in South Korea and a few other places, social media has brought about changes in another aspect of life: how gifts are sent and received.

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Lost in masses of clinical data? Help is here

28 January 2020 Department of Information Systems & Analytics , Faculty , Research , Feature , Data Science & Business Analytics , Healthcare Informatics , Intelligent Systems

The intensive care unit where Dr. Jean-Daniel Chiche works in Paris is what you would expect from an ICU. Amidst an atmosphere of respectful quiet and hushed tones lie patients in isolated rooms, often tethered to a bewildering array of tubes, wires, monitors and machines.

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Let’s maximise influence, but in a fair way

23 January 2020 CSFEATURES Department of Computer Science , Research , Feature , Artificial Intelligence

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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Move over Alfred, there’s a new butler in town

27 December 2019 CSFEATURES Department of Computer Science , Alum , Research , Feature , Artificial Intelligence

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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Lost? Eyes in the sky can tell you where you are

19 December 2019 CSMEDIA Department of Computer Science , Faculty , Research , Feature , Artificial Intelligence , Media

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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The holy grail of seamless systems integration

06 December 2019 Department of Information Systems & Analytics , Faculty , Research , Feature , Digital Transformation, Platforms & Innovation , Intelligent Systems

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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Making Bitcoin Safer — By Breaking It

25 November 2019 CSFEATURES Department of Computer Science , Faculty , Research , Feature , Security

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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Here’s to better apps for all of us

12 November 2019 Department of Information Systems & Analytics , Faculty , Research , Feature , Digital Innovation in the Service Economy

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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Quicker MRIs in the future? Machine learning can help

02 October 2019 CSFEATURES Department of Computer Science , Faculty , Feature , Algorithms & Theory , Artificial Intelligence

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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Helping computers see the world in 3D

09 September 2019 CSFEATURES Department of Computer Science , Student , Feature , Artificial Intelligence

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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There’s power in hierarchy — but not what you expect

27 August 2019 Department of Information Systems & Analytics , Faculty , Feature , Economics of IS

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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The dilemma of an unknown diameter

13 August 2019 CSFEATURES Department of Computer Science , Faculty , Feature , Systems & Networking

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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Building a Vibrant Innovation Ecosystem

25 July 2019 Department of Information Systems & Analytics , Faculty , Feature , IS Development & Management

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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Does “practice makes perfect” apply to businesses too?

01 July 2019 Department of Information Systems & Analytics , Faculty , Feature , IS Development & Management

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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Power to the consumer — user innovation drives new apps for mobile phones

14 June 2019 Department of Information Systems & Analytics , Faculty , Feature , Digital Innovation in the Service Economy

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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What Bayesian Optimisation can teach us about baking better cookies and more

28 May 2019 CSFEATURES Department of Computer Science , Faculty , Feature , Artificial Intelligence

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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Thinking Beyond STEM: A Lifelong Quest for Lifelong Learning

09 May 2019 Department of Information Systems & Analytics , Faculty , Feature

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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Future Wearables: smaller, faster and more independent

26 March 2019 CSFEATURES Department of Computer Science , Faculty , Research , Feature , Systems & Networking

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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Building Better IT Systems with Prof Chuan-Hoo Tan

01 March 2019 Department of Information Systems & Analytics , Faculty , Research , Feature , IS Development & Management

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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