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Roughly a decade ago, there was a big shake-up to the startup world. Entrepreneurs looking to fund their latest business venture no longer had to seek seed capital from traditional sources such as angel investors or wealthy individuals. Instead, a markedly different financing option was now trending: crowdfunding.

One day in May 2014, law enforcement officials swooped down on a warehouse in the San Francisco Bay Area. There they found a mini laboratory, pill press machines, and barrels filled to the brim with tiny tablets — marks of a counterfeit drug-making operation. Six men were arrested, including ringleader 35-year-old Jeremy Donagal, nicknamed the ‘Xanax King.’

All across the developed world, people are living increasingly sedentary lives. The average adult spends more than half their day sitting down — nearly six hours for those in Singapore, versus 7.7 hours and 8.3 hours for Americans and South Koreans, respectively.

In late 2017, two friends were struggling to make rent in San Francisco, a city known for its notoriously high cost of living. As they brainstormed ideas for how they could “make a few bucks,” the pair spied an opportunity: a big design conference was taking place in town and hotels were hard to come by. What if they bought a few air mattresses for their loft apartment and rented them out? The friends created a simple website to advertise their service, naming it Air Bed and Breakfast. Their idea was a hit, and soon Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, along with a third friend Nathan Blecharczyk, were looking for investors to grow their company.

Debugging is the bane of many a computer programmer’s existence — a task that’s both immensely costly and time-consuming. For a start, locating the source of a software error, or bug, is “like finding a needle in a haystack,” says Abhik Roychoudhury, a Provost's Chair Professor of Computer Science at NUS Computing.

If you like to dabble in exercise — whether as a weekend warrior, Ironman contender, or somewhere in between — you might remember 2015 as being an exciting year. Fitbit announced it was going public, Apple launched its first smartwatch, and the market became filled with a glittering array of swanky yet functional fitness devices you could comfortably wear on your wrist.

Today’s world moves at such a breakneck speed that it has transformed us into a society that loathes to wait. Online deliveries turn up at our doorsteps in two hours or less, credit card applications are approved near-instantaneously, and nobody has to wait a week anymore after an episode’s cliffhanger ending. Minimal delays is the name of the game — and we expect the same from our devices too.

Sound and music have always been a big part of Wang Ye’s life, guiding him through a career that has spanned being a research engineer at Nokia in Finland to an associate professor at NUS’s School of Computing. “Everybody, including myself, likes music,” says Wang, who leads the Sound and Music Computing Lab.

In the summer of 1983, the government organisation Atomic Energy of Canada Limited launched its newest radiation therapy machine. The Therac-25 was highly anticipated — it boasted a revolutionary dual treatment mode (employing either a powerful electron beam or X-rays to kill cancer cells), was more compact than its predecessors, and could be controlled entirely by a computer.

The past few years have been a mixed bag for facial recognition. In 2017, the technology stepped into the global spotlight as Apple launched the iPhone X — its first smartphone to rely on face, rather than fingerprint, scanning for authentication.

When Covid-19 came barrelling through the world, it upended nearly every aspect of our lives, forcing us to live, work, and play in completely new ways. We became accustomed to things we previously held off as a last resort or long resisted — things like face masks, Zoom, and having our movements monitored.

If you awoke this morning feeling a little more tired than usual, you might have glanced at your FitBit to see how many REM sleep cycles you clocked last night. Perhaps you then stumbled into the kitchen to grab an espresso (brewed fresh while you were getting dressed, thanks to a nifty app on your phone). And as you do, your smart fridge announces that you’re running out of milk, so you tell Alexa to add it to the weekly shopping list.

As any Ph.D. student will tell you, paychecks at that level aren’t especially generous. “I was always trying to find cheaper alternatives for household items,” recalls Lim Shi Ying of her doctoral student days at the University of Texas at Austin.

Imagine that you’re a book publisher gathering feedback for a new novel that your firm has recently released. Sales figures are useful, but you’re keen to find out more about what people actually think of the book. So you gather Amazon-style reviews, asking respondents to rate it on a scale of one to five.

For the most part, Henrik Huseby was an average, hardworking man — a small business owner making a modest living repairing iPhones and MacBooks in Ski, a tiny city in Norway with a population of roughly 20,000.

In one scene from the hit TV series Star Trek, Dr Bones McCoy runs to the aid of his fallen crewmate, who lies strewn across a barren, other-worldly landscape. He kneels down, reaches for the small handheld device strapped across his body, and waves it over the injured man. Seconds later, the device beeps and a diagnosis pops up on its tiny screen.

Anyone who’s part of an organisation, big or small, will likely be familiar with a company-wide IT system of some sort. It’s the boon and bane of many an employee’s existence, allowing them to deal with HR-related matters, manage their consultancy work with third parties, help track client projects and interactions, and so on.

When a natural disaster, terrorist attack, or any other crisis strikes, the best time to act isn’t just as it occurs, but rather in the months, even years, before it happens.

Modern-day learners have a wealth of “teachers” to turn to: online books, e-learning courses, YouTube tutorials, and even smartphone apps. If, for instance, you are yearning to lead a more mindful existence and seek everyday calm through the practice of meditation, you might download an app to guide you along.

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.