Filtered by: Department of Computer Science
The US and China recently agreed to open a dialogue on AI risks and safety incidents, even as both race to lead the field. Speaking to 焦点, Professor Anthony Tung from the Department of Computer Science explained where the real danger lies.
AI agents that can write code could spread through systems much like a virus, he said, bringing down banks and hospital equipment, and people could die as a result. The threat to humanity comes when AI is connected to nuclear controls or biological weapons. “Frontier or not, connecting AI to weapons isn’t a good idea,” said Prof Tung. Even a modest system only has to make one wrong decision.
He also compared the two countries’ approaches. A frontier model that slips out of control could do great harm. Open-source models tend to stay within a controllable range, but once they’re released, nobody can stop others building something stronger on top of them. “Each approach carries its own dangers,” he said.
Prof Tung’s suggestion goes against the industry’s race for scale. Today’s neural networks are black boxes, he noted, in the same way we can’t see how the brain makes its decisions. Many other AI systems are transparent about how they work and how they reach a decision. Smaller, more transparent AI of this kind would be “a lot safer”.
Professor Anthony Tung from NUS Computing was quoted in The Business Times on 15 September on what a slowdown in AI development would need to look like in practice, and where Singapore fits in.
The article followed an essay by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calling for a slower pace of AI capability development, backed by third-party evaluators, common safety standards and coordination between governments. Prof Tung, who is also AI lead for urban sustainability at the NUS AI Institute, said what is currently missing is rules with teeth: there are no agreed conditions for when an AI lab should stop, or what evidence should allow it to proceed. His suggestion is that a lab release a capability only as fast as accredited independent evaluators can assess it, so that the pace is set by evaluation throughput rather than by a competitor's release schedule. He cautioned that obligations should scale with risk, as a one-size-fits-all approach risks entrenching the very frontier labs regulation is meant to restrain.
On Singapore's position, Prof Tung noted that accreditation under schemes such as AI Verify establishes that a tester is competent within a defined scope, not that an AI system is safe. He pointed to a gap in how software safety, cybersecurity and AI safety are treated as separate disciplines with separate funding and regulators, even as incidents increasingly span all three, and suggested Singapore set up an institute with a mandate across all three areas. "A slowdown on its own is not a safety policy," he said, adding that the time gained has to be invested in better evaluation, stronger safeguards and more resilient systems around AI.
This episode of Ethiroli examined the growing threat of deepfake-enabled scams, with a particular focus on elderly victims targeted through investment fraud schemes circulated on messaging platforms. The segment covered why why elderly viewers are disproportionately affected, alongside broader risks, including fake explicit content targeting younger users and fraudulent business impersonation.
Dr Prahbu Natarajan from the Department of Computer Science shared practical detection methods, including listening for audio inconsistencies when comparing suspect clips against known genuine recordings. The programme also featured a live demonstration by Associate Professor Terence Sim, who showed how convincingly a video and voice can be fabricated using a short audio sample, reinforcing the segment's message that deepfake creation now requires minimal technical skill.
Vasantham Ethiroli (2 September): S23 Ep 21 Deepfake: The New Face of Deception
Four Computers Science undergraduates from NUS Computing were featured in The Straits Times for AHMA, an AI-powered app designed to help caregivers in Singapore find support services that match their needs.
Aishwarya Goyal, Hazel Low, Abhishek Paranjape and Andrew Soon began the project at a hackathon in 2025, drawing on their own experience caring for grandparents and supporting friends through mental health difficulties. Speaking to ST, Abhishek described the gap the team chose to work on as resource navigation: Singapore's social service agencies and government schemes offer a great deal to caregivers, but many struggle to work out which options apply to them.
AHMA uses a voice interface as its primary mode of interaction, a choice the team made with older caregivers in mind. A user can speak to the app about their situation and receive encouragement along with pointers to relevant community organisations. It currently supports English, Malay and Mandarin, and the team is working on adding dialects. The text-to-speech model was trained on Aishwarya's voice so that it sounds familiar to Singaporean users.
The students have been gathering feedback from caregivers, including at a recent session run by Mindfull Community, a non-profit that supports caregivers and families of people with mental health conditions. Hazel told ST that co-creating with caregivers is central to how the team works. Mindfull's deputy head of partnerships, Samantha Foo, said the sessions were valuable for both sides, and that the organisation intends to review the app once a working version is ready.
The team plans to launch a working product in the coming months.
