1. Objectives:

To develop innovative sentient systems and environments for user-inspired IDM applications.

2. Major Research Programmes/Projects.

The following are on-going projects or projects that are planned to be starting in the Ambient Intelligence Laboratory. Part of these efforts go towards building a NUS Living Lab to testbed application driven scenarios that embody IDM within interactive and intelligent sentient environments. The initial focus will be on the first three projects, namely "Intelligent Sentient Platforms", "iExplore", and "Cultural Experiences for Urban Public Space Using Cooperative Embedded and Mobile Sensing" as seed projects with their subsequent expansion and the consideration of the other projects as we draw in additional project funds.

2.1 Intelligent Sentient Platforms

Our main thrusts in exploring the sentient platform include designing suitable hierarchical and distributed architectures that are robust, reliable and scalable. It is a major challenge to have a generic architecture that will cater to many application scenarios. Such a platform will also include location awareness of devices and the tenants residing within the sentient environments. Some other important attributes that deserve attention in the sentient platform include being able to auto-configure in a truly plug and play fashion when new sensor devices are introduced into the environment, perform various levels of data aggregation or filtering, provide the essential elements for higher level contextualization and semantic discovery, and inter-work across the hierarchical, distributed platform to facilitate semi- or fully autonomous self-learning that is targeted at either improving system performance or building a knowledge base or profile of the end-users or beneficiaries of such an infrastructure. This later functionality will be a powerful enabler for developing and implementing "intelligent and learning" platforms that will be sensitive to the needs of the target application or end-user(s).

2.2 iExplore - Interactive Exploration of Cityscapes Through Space and Time

Exploring buildings, streets or entire cities from the past is currently only possible in a museum, and is often presented in static displays (models, plans, drawings, photos). Similarly, designs of new buildings are generally presented away from the actual building site, and abstract plans or at best models are used. This stretches the user's imagination, as it is often difficult for them to relate these displays to the current location and looks, and to immerse themselves in the scenes. The iExplore project aims to alleviate these problems by developing a mobile hand-held system that can be used to view buildings, streets, historic sites, landscapes or cityscapes on location, and for interactively exploring them through time (going into the past and the future) as well as space (by the user walking around the city, for example). The look of the objects in the past or future would be overlaid onto the present objects in the mobile device's display (sometimes also referred to as "magic lens").

2.3 Cultural Experiences for Urban Public Space Using Cooperative Embedded and Mobile Sensing

This is a collaborative research program that explores how networks of embedded and mobile devices can enable rich and participatory cultural experiences that invigorate urban public spaces and enhance civic life. We will focus on embedded and mobile sensing, which enable critical links between digital systems and the physical activity, geography and environment of real places. The program's first phase will consist of experimental interventions that are part public artwork, part technological research and part cultural study; the second phase will focus on generalizing the results to serve a wider variety of future applications. Design of the experimental interventions and the long-term research will be grounded by ethnographic study of the regions, sites and communities involved. This program will be executed by UCLA's Center for Research in Engineering, Media and Performance (REMAP) and Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), in collaboration with the National University of Singapore and Walt Disney Imagineering. NUS has already started sending interns under the NUS-Hollywood Lab arrangement to work with our collaborators in UCLA.

2.4 Development of a web-based educational game for Daylight in ArchitectureM

The educational game for Daylight in Architecture enables active learning through experimentation in game like scenarios. The core piece is an Avatar-led Virtual Lighting Lab in which students are introduced to 'what-happens-if' experiments. Prior knowledge obtained through abstract conceptualization will be tested, validated and inherited. The multi-user environment allows students to share their experiments and resulting fenestration designs with the community, similar to the Second-Life application. Successful designs will be rewarded in competition like scenarios. The game like scenario and rich media interaction encourages students to develop an optimum fenestration or facade design for a specific daylight climate, location as well as functional, environmental and aesthetical requirements.

2.5 Live Spaces

This project takes a use-scenario approach to define technical requirements for an IDM-enhanced infrastructure that will support a multitude of IDM applications. The application research will involve studying new methods of user engagement and the influence of such pervasive IDM-enhanced infrastructure on social and cultural user experience. We will develop a Live Spaces System Architecture (LiSSA) that will enable multiple cameras to map the real physical world into a 3D virtual world. This virtual world can then be gradually augmented with a rich plethora of different media types, and sniplets of other user inputs to create a rich and diverse virtual world that has parallels to the physical world. Imagine, a student walking through the halls of NUS, and at the same time LiSSA enables his avatar in the virtual world to do the same. Essential technologies to enable this to happen include computer vision systems that capture scenes and objects and translates these into the 3D virtual world. An underlying sensor and communications network infrastructure is required to facilitate human-to-human, human-to-machine, and machine-to-machine communications. The proposal will design and test various techniques to yield such a robust and reliable network infrastructure. These will include appropriate methods of sending data, networks that automatically learn and adapt to changing requirements on their own, and communication techniques that send digital media information in a manner that takes cognizance of the content, nature of the communication medium, and transmission technique.

For more details, please contact:

ARTS AND CREATIVITY LABORATORY

Interactive & Digital Media Institute

National University of Singapore

The Interactive and Digital Media Institute (IDMI) Arts and Creativity Laboratory (A&C Lab) revolves around interactive media art. Artwork based on new computational, communications, and interface technologies characterize the art of our times. However, it is not only new materials and tools, but the issues that they grapple with in our hypermediated society that make the new arts such an important part of our cultural lives. The Lab will support technological and artistic exploration in tandem in order to push both areas into new territory and provide NUS students the opportunity to be involved with current trends and practices in the media arts.

Foundations on which the IDM Arts and Creativity Lab stands are

1) A fundamental belief in the significance and vitality of the aesthetic experience in the arts, the sciences, and in every aspect of human engagement with the world,
2) The workings of the aesthetic experience can be understood through a combination of creative practice and scientific study,
3) New technologies are providing the opportunity for understanding and creating new types of mediated experience.

Major Research Programs

The activities within the A&C Lab will be diverse, interdisciplinary and collaborative in nature. The A&C Lab will work closely with the NUS Center for Fine Arts (CFA) that manages the NUS Museums, the University Cultural Center activities, and some 18 student arts groups in dance, literary arts and theater. Artists working with A&C Lab will find support for performance and exhibition space, as well as student arts group participation through the CFA.

The A&C Lab will involve and complement activity at the Conservatory of Music - currently the only Faculty at the University offering degrees in the practice of the arts. Explorations in to other areas of the vast space of interactive media arts will be achieved by bringing visiting artist and researchers who will have access to facilities and expertise across all the labs within the IDMI and these visitors will be one of the key mechanisms for driving innovative interdisciplinary work at the Institute.

NUS also supports cultural, artistic, and media theorists across several departments, and needs a place on campus where the arts that inform their discourses are actually practiced in order to maintain the vitality and relevance of work in this field. The A&C Lab mission includes filling this need for this academic community.

Three initial programs for the Lab are planned: New Musical Expression, Media Creativity Tools, and Artist Studio.

1. New Musical Expression

Music is undergoing a fundamental transformation from being the art of notes to being the art of sound. The expansion of sonic material available to artists is intimately tied to the advent of computers because there is no other instrument theoretically capable of generating any and all conceivable sound.

Sensors and robotic elements are being used to extend the expressivity of instruments. New instruments define new modes of human-machine interaction, and when instruments are networked by communications technologies, they enable new kinds of ensemble structures. The relationships between audiences, performers, instruments, composers, and music are all changing in exciting ways that will be explored in this program.

2. Media Creativity Tools

The paint brush and the pen are simply not up to the task of manipulating and creating multi-modal media experiences. For example, a common "palette" in today's artist studio is the media database. The palette can be filled with vast amounts of film and video, images and sounds. Artists might use the stored data as material for creating new stories films, or environments that create media experiences on the fly in a responsive and interactive dialog with performers and audiences for theater, games, music videos or art installations for a museum.

In order to make this possible, new tools and instruments of creation are necessary. Emerging artistic genres requires the development of suitable tools and systems to support creative "authoring" - whether the authoring is done by a human being, by system that automatically creates and presents media, or by people and machines in real-time creative collaboration.

3. IDM Artist Studio

The Arts and Creativity Lab will support an ongoing program of creative media work. Artists will have the A&C Lab facilities at their disposal, as well as access to the technologies and expertise across all of the other labs in the Institute. Engineering and programming support for new works will be made available so that artists can realize visions otherwise impossible.

The A&C Lab will either provide or have access to "installation" gallery space where artists can show their work either as it is in-progress or when it is finished. This is conceived as a place not only to show, but to involve NUS students in the creative process and the production of media works with artists, as well as to engage the public in the scientific and creative work at the IDMI.

A Living Lab

The Arts and Creativity Lab will be a place for arts-directed technology experimentation and innovative artistic practices. It will "open" in every way possible - by making equipment and expertise available to artists and researchers, and by making new media artists and researchers available to students and audiences. In this way, the culture of innovation and creativity nurtured at the Lab can enrich all aspects of NUS life.

For more details, please contact:

GAMES LABORATORY

Interactive & Digital Media Institute

National University of Singapore

The Games Laboratory is part of the Interactive Digital Media Institute at the National University of Singapore. The Lab is a multidisciplinary initiative, and includes researchers from engineering, communication and new media, computer science, and psychology. The Lab is headed by Dr. Alexander Nareyek, supported by two area coordinators, Dr. Ashraf Golam and Dr. Timothy Marsh.

Gaming already plays an important role besides conventional non-interactive entertainment media, such as film, television and radio, and continues to transform the entertainment landscape. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Asia-Pacific video game market alone will grow by 18 percent on a compound annual rate to a size of US$ 23 billion by 2009 (even excluding hardware and accessories).

The mission of the NUS Games Lab is to push the boundaries in gaming, focusing on new kinds of user experiences and ways to play games, innovative production approaches, and the application of games technology in areas like education and health care. The lab strives for an international leadership in research on electronic gaming, cooperating with and supporting the local and international games industry, and pursues the generation of innovative intellectual property, technology licensing and the spin off of new companies.

The lab's research focuses on three main areas:

- Artificial Intelligence and Automated Story Generation: Virtual actors that intelligently interact with the player in meaningful and emotionally involving ways, and automated storyline generation that adapts to the player's actions and preferences (area coordinator: Dr. Alexander Nareyek);
- Procedural Content Generation: Automated generation of virtual world environments, set design, character appearances, animations and special effects, and innovative modeling and design techniques and tools that substantially decrease art asset production effort (area coordinator: Dr. Ashraf Golam); and
- Serious Games: Applying game technology and study its usefulness for application areas like education/training, simulation, therapy and health care, as well as research on assessing/modeling/influencing the player's mental and emotional state (area coordinator: Dr. Timothy Marsh).

More information about the Games Lab and its projects can be found at: http://www.ai-center.com/games-lab/

For more details, please contact:

MIXED REALITY LABORATORY

Interactive & Digital Media Institute

National University of Singapore

The Mixed Reality (MXR) Laboratory, at the National University of Singapore (NUS), is aiming to push the boundaries of research into interactive new media technologies through the combination of technology, art, and creativity.

The key objectives of the MXR Laboratory are;

• Create a lab of excellence for interactive media and entertainment technology


• Provide multi-disciplinary project-based learning environment for students


• Transition creative media technology to promote economic development of Singapore


• Open new doors for creativity and the arts

In keeping with the objectives above, MXR Singapore will develop and transition those technologies that will; unlock power of human intelligence, link minds globally, accelerate learning, and enhance creativity. The MXR Lab will supply Singapore with the technologies that will be at the digital heart of many of Singapore's emerging sectors including Digital Exchange, Digital Entertainment and Digital Media, Digital Culture as well as adding value to Biomedical and Biotechnology initiatives.

MXR defines entertainment media as entertainment products and services that rely upon digital technology. These include traditional media that now use digital production processes such as movies, TV, computer animation, and music, as well as emerging services for wireless and broadband, electronic toys, video games, edutainment, and location-based entertainment (ranging from PC game rooms to theme parks).

Western designers create intellectual property for worldwide audiences. Singapore has not been strong in this area. Most manufacturers here are reluctant to invest in activities that don't provide immediate returns. Thus they lack the resources for creative development. MXR Lab will nurture this kind of creativity. Their international staff of digital entertainment experts will oversee teams of gifted students who produce original creative intellectual property for local industry and will help companies transition from original equipment manufacturing (OEM), to brand-ownership.

Furthermore as a research laboratory, MXR Lab will not only affect today's industry and economy, but tomorrow's global economy. Entertainment touches every part of our lives, and is one of the key drivers of digital technology. The research will cover cutting edge and as yet unknown technologies and impact on society such as entertainment robots and entertainment sensor networks.

The MXR Lab works on Interactive Media and Digital Entertainment Research and Cutting Edge Creativity for Singapore. Also it carries out research and development projects and programmers for companies, government agencies and military industry. They provide a platform for interdisciplinary collaboration with technologist and artists from Asia Pacific Region. MXR consultancy works on hardware and software of interactive systems and provides local industry with new multimedia applications to grow their businesses. MXR Lab is engaged in innovative academic research projects for graduate and undergraduate study.

The MXR Lab has also been invited and had exhibits in major media technology-art centers, such as a two year exhibit in Ars Electronica Museum of the Future in Austria. MXR Lab has also been invited to have permanent exhibits in the Singapore Arts Museum and the Singapore Science Center. Apart from academic journals, the work has been featured in numerous international media including CNN, CNBC, BBC World, Discovery, National Geographic, MTV, ABC, NBC and Fox. Altogether MXR Lab has been featured 200 times by international newspaper and magazines, 60 times by international TV media reports. "MagicLand" and "Magic Cubes" was demonstrated at CHI Portland, USA, 2005. Magic Land and Human Pacman was selected as two of the world's top inventions of 2005 and exhibited in the NextFest Chicago. "Poultry.Internet", "Age Invaders" have also widely publicized in journals, conference papers, demonstrations, and media around the world, and have been fully developed as working prototypes.

MXR Lab has produced large scale technological deliverables for DSTA and the Singapore military in interactive human computer systems. The Lab has spun off companies such as Real Space, Brooklyn-Media, and MXR-Cubes. Brooklyn-media is commercializing systems for digital games and mobile entertainment using novel interactive technologies. MXR Cubes recently had more than $1.4 million dollars of private investor funding. The MXR Lab has a number of patents in Interactive Media.

In the last few years, MXR Lab has received many local and international awards:

• Wired NextFest Worlds Top 100 Inventions 2007


• Premier International journal 35, Book Chapters 12, Conferences 70


• Wired NextFest Worlds Top 100 Inventions (twice) 2005


• "Young Researcher Award in games", Imagina 2005.


• Telefonica International Art Award 2005


• World Technology Network, Life Time Fellows Adrian Cheok and Zhou Zhi Ying 2005


• First prize Murcia Joven 2004. Youth artist from Murcia, Spain.


• Honorary Mention Best Artistic Projects Prize. Cyberart 04. Bilbao.


• National Young Scientist Award 2003 Winner, National Academy of Science


• Young Professional of the Year 2004, Singapore Computer Society


• Patron of the Arts Award 2004


• Young Artist Award, Mucia Joven 2004


• Tan Kah Kee Young Inventors' Award, 2004


• 2nd prize in the "Asian University Tour" category in this year's National University Student Contest of Creativity-in-Action 2004


• 2nd prize in the "International Idea 2 Product" competition, IT & Engineering Category, Austin, USA, 2004


• Life Time Fellow in "World Technology Award"


• International Touring Artist, National Arts Council, 2003

For more details, please contact:

MULTIMEDIA SENSING LABORATORY

Interactive & Digital Media Institute

National University of Singapore

1. Objectives

With increasing integration of computing, communication, networking and the world-wide web, multimedia information has become pervasive and permeates many aspects of our lives. Increasingly, we find information coming from multiple sources and in different media forms, such as text, image, audio, video and novel sensory forms. Managing live data (be it symbolic text-feed or signal sensor-feed) is particularly challenging in this environment. For example, the ability to analyse and fuse information from different sources and in multiple media types has become critically important in many information processing tasks. The multimedia sensing laboratory is organized such that it comprises researchers who look at handling of correlated multimedia information (live as well as archived) with a rigorous information-centric approach. Overall, the group conducts research related to the processing, interaction, storage and retrieval of multimedia sensor information. The group will focus on fundamental research with twin emphasis on theoretical and systems research with a long-term aim of creating real-world impact.

2. Major Research Programmes/Projects

These are the initial set of projects which will be later be expanded to encompass more areas of multimedia sensory information handling as well as application areas such as education.

Active Multimedia Sensing

This project aims to develop the theoretical foundation, algorithms, architectures and prototypes for active sensing for a wide variety of applications such as surveillance, monitoring and the web. It requires the development of innovative techniques in active collaborative sensing involving: multiple sensors in multiple media; mobile sensors; devices; and biological systems. The idea here is to harness the power of diverse sensors in an orchestrated manner to optimally perform the given tasks. The areas of focus will include multimedia monitoring, mobile sensing, active devices and biologically plausible modeling.

Multimedia Event Capture through Sensors and Context

Humans tend to organize their lives around events. Therefore, devices to capture events easily for archiving and sharing them are essential. Such devices will utilize different sensors to capture specific types of events and related experiential information effortlessly for use by people who are not technologists. Technology to capture specific types of events from multimodal information will then need to be developed. This is a complex area. The success will depend on developing specific event detection techniques by using all appropriate sensors and human input as much as required in early stages. The focus will not be on fully automatic techniques from specific medium. This project will focus on specific event detection using multi-modal information with human assistance, as maybe suitable in specific contexts.

Multimedia Event-handling Middleware

There is a need to build infrastructure for handling multimedia sensing data which can allow for seamless access of live as well as archived data. Since this is a dynamic and evolving infrastructure, the framework should have an internet-style plug and play philosophy. For example, each sensor or other data source is registered with the information source registry (ISR). This gives the location and viewpoint for the sensors and characteristics of other information sources. When a new sensor is added to the system, it is entered in the registry and its key parameters for the transformation are also entered. Each sensor captures some physical attributes of the environment being observed. The nature of sensor data and its mapping to the environment should be part of the information source transformer that is available to the system. All data from each sensor is stored in the media storage. Though each sensor stores its data in terms of the sensor coordinate system in the storage, each sensor's relative offset with respect to the physical environment are available and stored in the ISR. All assimilated information from different sensors is in an application independent manner - it should be as objective as possible. Application oriented views and functions could be defined on top of the objective system. These views could be computed and separate databases created for each application view. Thus, using the same data, one could have a surveillance view, or be enjoying an art gallery, or a video ethnography view. All these views could be computed from the objective database using different event models and related attributes. The ultimate aim is to build flexible yet scalable middleware to handle multimedia sensing information which can be seamlessly accessed by the applications built on top of the middleware.

Multimedia Event Presentation

Keyword based navigation on the current WWW becomes very tedious in practice. There is a need to develop completely new approaches to combine navigation and search environments for finding appropriate events (which are captured using multimedia sensors). Events are much better captured and represented using photos and video than text and hence will require novel presentation environment. Such presentation environment will require a rich combination of ideas from visual arts and human-computer interaction to present event experiences to people. When there are a huge number of events - past, current, and future - how do we find events of interest? All events should be somehow aggregated and an environment developed in which events of interests could be discovered. For accessing all these events, powerful and efficient indexing approaches must be developed. Events may not be indexable using techniques employed in current search engines and relational databases. We may require a combination of multi-dimensional and inverted file approaches. It would be interesting to explore these ideas in a particular domain like education.

3. Key People

Mohan S Kankanhalli (Head and PI)
Chua Tat Seng (PI)
Roger Zimmermann (PI)
Ramesh Jain (External Collaborator, University of California at Irvine)
(More people will be added on later as the projects get concretized)

For more details, please contact:

MULTIMODAL ANALYSIS LABORATORY

Interactive & Digital Media Institute

National University of Singapore

One pressing problem for industry, business and government is the analysis, storage and retrieval of information from the visual images, video texts and internet sites which are proliferating through the rapid advance of digital technology. Efficient practices for managing, searching and retrieving data from text-based documents have been developed. However, visual images (e.g. photographs, drawings and diagrams), video, texts and internet sites remain elusive with regards to management, coding and searching for information. The problem intensifies as the movie clips and video-blogs in video-sharing websites such as "YouTube" become the standard forum for exchanging information. The Multimodal Analysis Lab offers the unique opportunity for social scientists and computer scientists to work together to help solve this important problem. The interdisciplinary research team will integrate social science approaches to multimodal communication (involving language, visual images, sound, music, gesture, dance and so forth) with computer-based techniques for multimedia analysis to develop new approaches to modelling, analyzing, storing and retrieving information from print and digital media.

The Multimodal Analysis Lab team will undertake the "Events in the World" project funded by MDA/NRF to develop prototype software to analyse the construction of key events in the world in a single day. The areas of focus include world events, business, science, education and arts/entertainment. The construction of events across technologies (print and digital) and regions (e.g. Asia/Pacific, North America, and Europe) will be analysed to investigate the portrayal of events across cultures and the relative affordances and constraints of different forms of technology. The "Events in the World" project will advance our understanding of cross-cultural constructions of events and our knowledge of the relations between digital technology and patterns of thinking.

The "Events in the World" project has significant downstream R&D applications for industry, business and government for analysis, search and retrieval of information. The project will extend existing computer-based techniques of multimedia analysis which depend on low-level feature information in specific areas of activity (e.g. news and sports broadcasts, movie trailers, feature films, documentaries and surveillance data). In addition, the project will advance research in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) at the National University of Singapore (NUS) through the development of specialised interactive digital tools for modelling and analysing multimodal communication. The research has the potential to place FASS at the fore-front of humanities research which utilises IDM.

The "Events in the World" project will be undertaken in conjunction with the "Multimodal Knowledge" project for ‘IDM in Education' research. The aim is to develop and use IDM to analyse the multimodal construction of knowledge in mathematics, science and English print and digital learning materials, and to develop platforms for analysing classroom activities in schools and institutions of higher learning. The use of different modalities of representation for the construction of knowledge will be investigated, with the aim of developing effective pedagogical practices for teaching multiliteracy skills so students can be creatively innovative in today's digital world.

Investigators Associate Professor Kay O'Halloran (Department of English Language & Literature, NUS) and Associate Professor Roger Zimmermann (School of Computing, NUS) will lead the 20 member Multimodal Analysis Lab team. The collaborators are Professor Mohan Kankanhalli (School of Computing, NUS) and leading international scholars Professor Theo van Leeuwen (Dean of Humanities, University of Technology, Sydney) and Professor Ramesh Jain (Donald Bren Professor in Information & Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine). The research team will include four Research Fellows, over ten PhD students and four Research Assistants.

For more details, please contact:

SOCIAL AND COGNITIVE LABORATORY

Interactive & Digital Media Institute

National University of Singapore

The Social and Cognitive Laboratory provides an interdisciplinary setting where social science and humanities-related research is brought to bear on interactive and digital media issues. All members of the Lab are also members of the Science Technology and Society Research Cluster at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

Scholars in this Lab are deeply interested in the effects of new digital media technologies on social groups and practices, and the effects of social groups/practices on new technologies. There are also areas in which technical innovation can be directly catalyzed by the Lab's research, such as the production of new templates for digitized educational media, as well as possible new GIS applications. Scholars in this Lab engage in technology innovation through the production of literature, conferences and workshops, and other forms of oral and written engagement with engineers, scientists, and members of the educated public who affect - and are affected by - new media.

Lab members study interactive and digital media from numerous perspectives: cultural studies, cognitive, behavioral, social networks, ethical, and legal. Their methodologies include ethnographic research, surveys, participant observation, archival research, and experiments to explore IDM's impact on individuals, social groups and norms.

Examples of members' existing and planned research projects include the following:

Online Communities and Massive Multi-online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs)
This project aims to understand what makes MMORPGs attractive and engaging. The researchers plan to study how players of MMORPGs engage in the creation of communities and how this process is facilitated both by the games' interfaces and the social expectations of players.

Ethical Implications of Serious Gaming among Youth in Singapore
Serious games are central to the exploitation of digital media technologies for education. There is an implied acceptance of the premise that this game genre provides students with a "neutral" playing environment. This study seeks to challenge this assumption and explore imbedded notions of masculinity, individuality and whiteness in serious games and assess the impact that those notions have on the shaping of Singapore's youth.

Mobile Devices, Format, Content and Media Engagement*
Young people carry their mobile devices everywhere. These devices allow them to talk with friends, access their email, listen to music, search the Web and view their favorite TV programs. Researchers have found that the format or structural features of television messages have an impact on the viewer's experience and their ability to engage with the content. This study will explore how the format of television content helps young viewers engage with mobile TV content.

Cyber-Cafe Culture in Developing Asia's Small and Medium Towns*
This project seeks to explore how youth in developing countries use technologies that were originally designed for rich/developed ones. The project will concentrate on the use of interactive media in small and medium size cities in six countries (India, Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, and Vietnam) with the aim of ascertaining the ways in which youth use cybercafés to access interactive and digital media and use it to fit their social and economic reality.

Community Engagement in Public Participatory GIS
Public Participatory Geographical Information Systems (PPGIS) is the term given to initiatives to enhance community engagement and ownership in the management of spatial information. This project will consider two forms of PPGIS broadly concerned with issues of environmental governance and of significant importance in the region. The first theme deals with the application of PPGIS in disaster reconstruction effort, based on preliminary work in post-earthquake NIAS, Indonesia and the second with promoting community engagement in water issues in Singapore.*

The Gaming Industry in Singapore: Industry Dynamics and Social Network Analysis*
This project proposes to study the structure of the online gaming industry in Singapore. The purpose is to examine the particular industry development model in the Asia-based new media economies. Literature in the area of creative industries emphasizes the importance of creative industry models in the US, UK and Australia, but there has been a lack of attention to successful new media production centers in the Asian context.

Design and Analysis of Large-scale Collaborative Learning Environments, and an Assessment of Critical Internet Literacy in Primary School Children in Singapore*
The goal of this project is to propose new interactive media systems and pedagogical tools in order to better support large-scale collaboration in a distributed learning community. Overall, this project focuses on how interactive media, individual/group cognition, and social interaction can be interwoven to better support collaborative learning. It suggests a shift away from the psychology of the individual (or the small group) to the community as the unit of analysis.

*These projects are currently underway or the PIs have applied for research grants.

Current Lab Members:

A/P Milagros Rivera (Communications & New Media) Lab Head
A/P Gregory Clancey (History)
A/P David Higgit (Geography)
Assistant Prof. Cho Hichang (Communications and New Media)
Assistant Prof. Chung Peichi (Communications and New Media)
Assistant Prof. Feng Chen-Chieh (Geography)
Assistant Prof. Ingrid Hoofd (Communications and New Media)
Assistant Prof. Lim Sun Sun (Communications and New Media)
Assistant Prof. Byungho Park (Communications and New Media)
Assistant Prof. T.T. Sreekumar (Communications and New Media)
Assistant Prof. Wang Yi-Chen (Geography)

For more details, please contact:

SOCIAL ROBOTICS LABORATORY

Interactive & Digital Media Institute

National University of Singapore

1. OBJECTIVES

The Social Robotics Laboratory (SRL) is established to foster cross disciplinary research, design and development of socially competent, personal, healthcare and edutainment robots for scientific, social and economical impacts through the synergy from arts, engineering, medicine and sciences.

It has been envisioned by many that different kinds of social robots will be coming into our lives in the next 5-10 years' time as PC and internets have made their ways into our households. Bill Gates, leader of the PC revolution, sees the robotics industry to be emerging in a strong way, and is going along a similar path, facing the same challenges as the computer industry 3 decades ago. Indeed, the robotics industry is forecasted to grow into a multibillion-dollar market in the next 5- 10 years.

The key strengths in Singapore for the past few decades have been electronics, manufacturing, automation and service industries, together with robotics and control technologies, amongst many others. To position Singapore competitively in the new era, it is recognized that Singapore could leverage on these well established strengths, and excel in the emerging global industry in integrative human-robotics, in the same manner as the creation of the Singapore electronic miracles in the late 80s and early 90s.

The research team at the SRL includes leading researchers across the campus, and renowned scientists from top Universities overseas. It has leading strengths in the areas of robotics, intelligent control, sensor fusion, computational intelligence, and system integration, culminated from more than a decade long of intensive and fruitful research in these areas. Backed by strong supports and participation from educationists, medical doctors, and artists, the multi-faceted technological challenges of seamless human-robot interaction can be confidently tackled.

The main objectives of SRL are:
(i) Advanced cross disciplinary research of social robotics for improving the lives of humans worldwide;
(ii) Sophisticated common R&D platforms under one roof for more cohesive and vibrant research across arts, engineering, medicine, and sciences;
(iii) Dedicated human capital development for creativity, leadership, and visionary in the area of social, personal, healthcare, and edutainment robotics;
(iv) High intellectual properties throughputs for technology transfer and start ups in making social and economic impact; and
(v) Magnet for joint research and international collaboration.

2. SCOPE OF ACTIVITIES

The multi-faceted research program is structured to investigate all aspects of social, personal, medical and edutainment robotics. It aims to produce a seamless integration of artificial agents into the human society, with intelligent robots that can participate in and learn from intuitive, long term interaction with humans, and which can be safely deployed in myriad applications ranging from entertainment, healthcare/eldercare, education and childcare. These robots will act as intelligent companions which enrich the lives and co-exist in harmony with humans.

3. RESEARCH THRUSTS

Research and development carried out in SRL will focus on issues including interaction philosophies, high level robot cognition and low level mechanical control, fusing advanced engineering and computing technologies with the social sciences and medicine. The four main research thrusts are:

(i) (ii) (iii) (iv) For more details, please contact: