Filtered by: School of Computing
Provost's Chair Professor Hahn Jungpil from the Department of Information Systems and Analytics joined CNA938 The Big Question, to discuss two Singapore-made AI-generated films that have reignited debate over AI's role in creative work – and where the line sits between AI as a tool and AI as a crutch.
Prof Hahn warned that critical thinking is the skill most at risk of quietly fading: "It's so accessible, and it provides relatively good output right from the start. You have to dig deeper, challenge it, even fight with it, to get really good content out of it. A lot of people, especially students, stop short of doing that and just accept what they're given. That's the real danger – we stop exercising our own reasoning."
He also argued that augmentation and replacement aren't opposites but a matter of time: "Augmentation only stays augmentation if you deliberately keep a hand in what you're doing, and that's a very difficult thing to do day to day." Left unchecked, he said, this deskilling happens quietly – "AI attacks that aspect of skills development most critically, and invisibly. We don't realise it until the skill is gone." – with judgement itself eroding the less it's exercised.
On NUS' move to make AI coursework compulsory for all undergraduates, he said assessment needs to evolve in step, favouring oral reasoning tests over take-home essays that AI can easily produce – so students are evaluated on how they think, not just what they output.
Listen to the full segment: CNA938 Rewind - The Big Question (13 Aug): How much is too much when it comes to AI?
NUS Business Analytics Centre has received a S$1.5 million personal donation from Mr Xie Xin, President of Lark Technologies, the largest single gift in the centre's 13-year history, Lianhe Zaobao reported on 7 August.
S$1 million of the donation establishes a new scholarship for students in the Master of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA) programme, with up to two awards expected in its first year and plans to extend it further. The remaining S$500,000 sets up an AI fund at the centre to support trustworthy AI research, including work on building AI systems that are safer, more reliable and more accountable.
Associate Professor Terence Sim from the Department of Computer Science joined CNA938 #TalkBack segment on facial recognition technology in public transport, prompted by the closed trial now underway at Punggol Coast MRT Station.
Host Daniel Martin put the question to Prof Sim, whose research spans biometric authentication and facial recognition: can a system built to verify one face at a time handle a gantry at rush hour?
Prof Sim's answer centred on throughput. Similar systems already run in cities such as Beijing, Osaka and Moscow, but Singapore's population is more racially diverse than most, and that diversity exposes a known weak point. "It's been found that darker skin tones cause problems for the systems, elderly women tend to have difficulty, and of course children, because their facial structure changes rapidly," he said, adding that headgear, masks and even a fresh shave can throw off a match against someone's enrolled image.
Average daily MRT ridership hit 3.49 million trips in 2025, according to the latest LTA statistics, concentrated in evening bursts between 5pm and 7pm, a volume far beyond any office facial recognition deployment. Prof Sim outlined three ways such a system can fail: false positives, false negatives, and misidentification, where one enrolled commuter is charged for another's ride. Citing the best error rates he could find, he estimated roughly 10,500 people could be barred from the gate daily, and about 1,750 could be wrongly charged for someone else's trip.
His conclusion: lighting, crowding and privacy concerns mean facial recognition technology is unlikely to replace tapping outright.
Listen to the full segment: CNA938 Rewind - #TalkBack (6 Aug): Is facial recognition effective for public transport?
The Straits Times covered the launch of the Razer-NUS Joint AI Research Lab on 5 August, reporting on the lab's role in advancing AI models that support both in-game and real-life tasks.
The article detailed how research from the lab will feed into two Razer products. The first is AVA, a 3D holographic desk companion first shown at CES 2026, which uses camera and microphone sensors to manage schedules, offer reminders and assist with gaming. Razer's chief strategy officer Li-Meng Lee described the ambition as moving digital companions "to the next level" beyond earlier concepts like Tamagotchi. The second is Project Motoko, a wearable AI headset that scans a user's surroundings to provide contextual advice, positioning Razer against wearables from Meta and Google.
The piece reported that the lab, based at NUS, will house around 20 PhD and postdoctoral researchers with direct access to Razer's engineering team for real-world validation and product integration. Both parties will jointly fund operations and jointly own resulting intellectual property.
Associate Professor Ooi Wei Tsang, co-director of the lab, was quoted describing the collaboration as charting "the pathway towards next-generation intelligent systems that will shape the future of interactive gaming experiences."
A two-storey standalone building on the NUS campus now houses the Razer-NUS Joint AI Research Lab, marking Razer's first joint research lab with a university under a three-year partnership, per Lianhe Zaobao's 5 August report on the launch.
NUS Associate Professor Ooi Wei Tsang, co-director of the lab, told the paper the team comprises around 20 members, mostly from the NUS School of Computing, including three professors and a number of PhD students and researchers. He named the lab's near-term research priorities as reducing latency in human-machine interaction and improving machine memory to enable more personalised responses, with potential applications extending to fields such as autonomous driving.
NUS PhD student Yu Zhaochen, a member of the research team, pointed to a current limitation of AI gaming tools in the report: in-game content updates continuously, while an AI assistant's knowledge base does not always keep pace, which can make its guidance outdated.
Razer and NUS data cited in the piece projects the global gaming AI market growing from US$4.2 billion (approximately S$5.4 billion) in 2025 to US$66.8 billion by 2035, alongside a Microsoft survey finding that close to 80 per cent of gamers would accept at least one AI feature they believe would improve their gaming experience.
Never about making money in the first place" is how Razer's chief strategy officer Li-Meng Lee described the company's investment logic behind the new Razer-NUS Joint AI Research Lab, in the Business Times' 5 August piece framing the partnership through Razer's broader push to build a software and AI layer around its hardware business.
The Razer-NUS Joint AI Research Lab will draw on NUS' AI research capabilities and Razer's product expertise to explore what the article termed gaming artificial narrow intelligence (GANI), a category of AI models built for interactive digital environments. Applications cited included generating context-aware objectives and dialogue during gameplay, and adjusting difficulty in live matches to sustain engagement and fairness.
The lab houses 15 to 20 researchers from the NUS School of Computing, with Razer staff supporting projects on an ad hoc basis. Three research pillars were named: core model innovation, real-time content systems, and advanced personalisation.
NUS Associate Professor Ooi Wei Tsang, director of the research lab, was quoted on the division of contributions: "NUS brings the smarts, the talent, the pipeline to help build what we're trying to envision here. What Razer brings is real-world adoption of these use cases." The article confirmed intellectual property arising from the research will be jointly owned by Razer and NUS.
Market research firm InsightAce Analytic projects the value of AI in gaming will grow from US$4.2 billion in 2025 to US$66.8 billion by 2035, a figure cited in the piece.
Professor Anthony Tung from the Department of Computer Science was interviewed on CNA938 Rewind, where he spoke with host Daniel Martin about the CNA investigation uncovering AI-generated videos using Alibaba founder Jack Ma's likeness to spread falsehoods about Singapore.
Prof Tung noted that the capability isn't new, and what has changed is accessibility – these tools now run on an ordinary desktop, which puts them beyond the reach of platform-level safeguards. "It's not that difficult to do it on a local machine, your own desktop, nowadays," he said.
Prof Tung shared that his research group's focus has shifted accordingly. Rather than trying to stem the flood of AI-generated misinformation at the source, the team is working on what he called a "safety jacket" for end users. "This is a flood of misinformation. Our research is how to build a safety jacket for them; we're not trying to stop the flood anymore."
