15 May 2023 — The National University of Singapore (NUS) Business School and School of Computing (NUS Computing) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Wuxi Economic Development District (WEDD) on 5 May 2023, to advance collaboration in research and development (R&D), and talent cultivation in Big Data, Business Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence.
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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.
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.
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.’
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.
In April 2018, Hyeongcheol Kim flew to Montreal for work. The young PhD student was excited — it was his first time in the Canadian city and the conference he was about to attend was one of the biggest in his field of computer science. What’s more, Montreal was only a three hour journey from Quebec City, a place he had glimpsed many times on the small screen.
In recent years, the Singapore government has tapped on facial recognition for various purposes as part of its ‘smart nation’ initiative. For instance, Changi Airport’s Terminal 4 uses facial recognition technology for various purposes such as passenger check-in, immigration and boarding, while GovTech launched a launched the "Lamppost-as-a-Platform" project, which outfits some 95,000 traditional lampposts in the country with a network of wireless sensors and cameras to support urban and transportation planning and operations.
Associate Professor Terence Sim from the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore stated in an exclusive interview with China-based news website The Paper that there are trends of facial recognition technology being abused, and that laws protecting such technology could be further strengthened. He also elaborated further on privacy issues regarding such technology.
When a secondary school friend contacted him out of the blue a few months ago asking for a verification code on WhatsApp, administrative executive Tan Jun Heng, 25, did not suspect anything was amiss.
His friend simply claimed to have "accidentally" sent the code to his number. But within seconds of sending the code, Mr Tan was automatically locked out of his own WhatsApp account. It had been hijacked.
Mr Tan and his friends are among a growing pool of WhatsApp users who have become victims of social hacking, where scammers use already hijacked social media accounts to contact victims by posing as their friends or family.
National University of Singapore's Associate Professor Chang Ee-Chien, whose research interests include data privacy, said the impersonation tactics used by hackers are "very low-tech, but very effective, as people tend to trust their friends or family".
With full access to their victim's account, hackers may then exploit the victim's personal relationships and ask for money from friends or family. Or, if they glean enough information about their victim's place of employment, they may also target the victim's workplace, added Prof Chang.
However, experts say, there are preventive measures that users can take to prevent such attacks.
Ms Wong and AiSP executive committee member James Tan said setting up a two-step verification process on your WhatsApp account can prevent others from signing in to it. Users should not click on suspicious looking links, even if they are purportedly from friends or family, they added.
For impersonation scams, however, "the only solution is to not trust people", said Prof Chang. He added: "It is very important that you must presume that whoever is speaking to you on the other end is not your friend."
3 November 2020 – Professor Chua Tat Seng, Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple Chair Professor at NUS Computing and Director of the NUS-Tsinghua Extreme Search Center (NExT++), won the Best Paper award at the ACM Multimedia Conference. The conference was held online from 12 – 16 October 2020, and is a leading international forum for researchers focusing on advancing the research and applications of multiple media such as images, text, audio, speech, music, sensor and social data.
Just two months ago, Mr Na Yi Rong had little to no knowledge of Financial Technology (FinTech). The Engineering Science graduate from the National University of Singapore (NUS) is now working full time as a product management lead at a local FinTech start-up, after receiving the job offer when he was participating in the NUS-FinTechSG Programme.
Jointly developed by the NUS FinTech Lab and Strategic Technology Management Institute (STMI), the programme was launched on 6 July 2020 to nurture Singapore’s next generation of FinTech talents and full stack developers. The pioneer batch of 25 students graduated on 10 September in a virtual ceremony after undergoing a structured two-month intensive full-time course on the fundamentals of financial services technology and business.
In 2019, Singapore generated around 744 million kg of food waste — that’s equivalent to two bowls of rice per person a day, or around 51,000 double decker buses.
Food wastage is a real problem — it does not only cause environmental problems, but also affects our food security and puts pressure on our resources.
When Preston Wong, 31, saw his family members clearing out excess expiring food items from the refrigerator one day, he wondered if a platform could be built to facilitate a redistribution of surplus food. He pitched the idea to his National University of Singapore (NUS) schoolmate, Kenneth Ham, 30.
The duo didn’t even share the same classes — Preston majored in law and accountancy, while Kenneth majored in computer science — but they knew each other from church.
In their final year at NUS, they decided to take the leap to develop an app to tackle food wastage in Singapore by reducing the amount of buffet food that’s thrown away at the end of the day.
Your heartbeat quickens as you watch your video game avatar run through the twisting corridors of the castle. There is still treasure to be found and a hostage to be rescued, and time is running out. Suddenly, a large shadow looms on the dim candlelit stone walls, followed by a low roar that sounds awfully close. You take a deep breath, clutch your mace a bit tighter, and ready yourself to attack. You swing around the corner, weapon raised, and…
24 June 2020 – NUS Computing Professor Roger Zimmermann and his team won second place at the Adaptation Algorithms for Near-Second Latency Grand Challenge, held online from March to May this year.
When Yingda Zhai was working on his PhD in Austin, Texas, he used to stroll through the neighbourhood he lived in not too far from campus. On these walks, he saw something that puzzled him, something that would set the course of his research for the next few years.
What Zhai noticed was this: his neighbourhood wasn’t that well-to-do, and lining the streets were shops like MetroPCS, Cricket Wireless, and FamilyMobile. These small cell phone companies, also known as mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs), offered cheap plans without any contracts or credit checks. But the snag was that they came with slower connection speeds, smaller network coverage, and without features such as phone tethering.
If you have been to parts of Orchard Road or Bugis Junction, two busy shopping streets in Singapore, you might have noticed something unusual. There, familiar “traffic light men” flash red and green to help guide pedestrians safely across the road. But these are also accompanied by matching LED strips on the ground.
In recent years, Singapore and a handful of other cities, including Sydney, Tel Aviv, and Augsburg, have embedded lights into pavements at busy intersections as an additional safety measure for pedestrians. Ilsan in South Korea has gone even further, employing flickering lights and laser beams at road crossings to warn walkers of the dangers ahead.
Whatever the means, their target is the same: the heads-down tribe of smartphone zombies — people who walk around perpetually glued to their mobile device.
These days, artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere we look. It’s what powers predictive searches on Google, enables Spotify and Amazon to recommend new songs and products, puts self-driving vehicles on the road, helps doctors to quickly diagnose diseases…the list goes on. With the presence of AI growing ever larger in our lives, so has the need for us to trust it.
14 February 2020 – NUS Computing Associate Professor Roger Zimmermann received the Best Paper Runner-up award at the 6th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing and Intelligence Systems (CCIS 2019), held from 19 to 21 December 2019 at Carlton Hotel Singapore.
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.
6 November 2019 – Computer Science PhD student Shen Zhiqi received the Best Student Paper award at the ACM Multimedia (ACM MM) 2019 conference held from 21 to 25 October this year in Nice, France.
30 October 2019 – Computer Science PhD alumnus Dr Abdelhak Bentaleb was conferred the 2019 SIGMM Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis in Multimedia Computing. The award was presented at the 2019 ACM Multimedia conference held from 21 to 25 October in Nice, France.
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