ventriloquy: Recent Episodes
Kenneth Y T Lim
ventriloquy is associated with my blog - http://voyager.blogs.com/ - in which i document my doctoral studies in cognitive psychology and spatial discourse.
will you be attending AERA 2025?
our team is very happy and grateful to have the opportunity to share two projects during next year's annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.
In the Special Interest Group on Environmental Education, we will share 'Approaching Environmental Education with Campus-wide Environmental Sensors in Schools: a Case Study from Singapore'. its abstract reads:
This study investigates the impact of integrating low-cost, open-source environmental sensors into geography education for academically lower-performing students in Singapore secondary schools. Using mixed methods from 2020-2024, we examine how technology-enhanced, hands-on learning affects students' critical thinking, inventive reasoning, and self-efficacy. Findings reveal significant improvements in learning approaches, engagement, and self-efficacy. Using everyday environments as learning canvases enabled students to connect their intuitive understandings of their school campus with geographical concepts and improve their data literacy. The paper discusses implications for curriculum design and educational policy, emphasizing strategies to promote equity through technology integration. Recommendations aim to enhance learning outcomes and address achievement gaps, contributing to broader goals of social justice in education.
In the section on Learning and Instruction: Engineering and Computer Science, we will share 'Enhancing Novice Programming Education with an AI-Augmented Learning Tool'; its abstract reads:
This study explores the development and implementation of an AI-augmented coding assistance tool designed for novice programmers. The tool’s impact on learning, problem-solving, and motivation in introductory programming courses was investigated using a mixed-methods approach. The study, grounded in Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development theory, cognitive load theory, and self-efficacy theory, was piloted with post-secondary and tertiary students from diverse educational contexts. Findings indicate that the AI tool effectively addressed common programming challenges, reduced cognitive load, and enhanced students' self-efficacy. The tool showed potential for promoting equity in computer science education. This research contributes to understanding how AI can enhance computer science education, particularly for beginners, and has implications for educational practice and policy.
we thank God for this opportunity.
in July 2023, our team - together with a team of partners from the National Healthcare Group and Khoo Teck Puat Hospital, our university's school of medicine and the development team from MAGES Studio - applied for and were awarded a grant from the Institute of Adult Learning.
our grant was titled Enhancing the informed consent process for complex surgical procedures, and the project was conducted from September that year till October this year.
we are very happy that our national broadsheet has picked up our story, it does encourage us greatly.
:-)
today we were so very privileged to have the opportunity to interact with staff and students of de la Salle Santiago Zobel. our team members Bryan, Aaron and Yuyue facilitated a learning activity themed around the affordances for learning of Mixed Reality with specific focus on the Apple Vision Pro.
:-)
We are happy to embed slides from the presentation representing the closure of the preceding funding cycle of our work which dates from 2013.
This recent funding cycle (the work reported here) was from 2020 - 2024.
We work with schools as we help teachers design curriculum to surface learner intuition from phenomenological perspectives.
Through God’s Grace, our work continues with a new tranche of funding through 2027.
Disciplinary Intuitions / Maker Motes: using IoT for authentic inquiry-based learning from Kenneth Lim
our team members Bryan and Malcolm were thrilled today to have the opportunity to share their work and reflections on the research process to Year Elevens of Jurong Pioneer Junior College.
Malcolm and Bryan shared on Integration of Deep Learning in digital Clock Drawing Tests onto consumer platforms for enhanced detection of mild cognitive impairment.
we are grateful to the staff and students of the college for so kindly hosting us.
we are very happy that we will have an opportunity to share our work on neuroergonomics and sport science during the 6th conference of the Association of Southeast Asian Teacher Education Network (AsTEN).
our contribution is titled Exploring the relationships between microclimate and exercise performance in students context using low-cost DIY wearables and machine learning. the conference will be held in Ho Chi Minh City on the 14th of December 2024.
:-)
further to my post two months’ ago, my team and i are really happy and privileged to welcome six college students (from a total of twenty applicants) to our projects offered under NTU’s Undergraduate Research Experience on Campus (URECA) programme for the Academic Year 2024 / 2025.
our students hail from our university's School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, from the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, from the National Institute of Education, and from the the College of Computing and Data Science.
the opportunity to participate in URECA is extended through invitation only to select second- and third-year undergraduates, who will subsequently be conferred as NTU President Research Scholars.
the projects we have offered are:
NIE24172 – Exploring the use of games for learning Graph Theory
NIE24220 – Designing for the use of wearables to investigate the role that school microclimate has on student engagement and thermal comfort – Data Analysis and Machine Learning
NIE24221 – Designing for the use of wearables to investigate the role that school microclimate has on student engagement and thermal comfort – Hardware engineering
NIE24228 – Exploring the effectiveness of game-based environments in developing relationship management amongst Singapore students
NIE24230 – Exploring the relationship between interactive story games and students’ creative writing skills
NIE24234 – Using Data Analysis and Machine Learning to investigate the role that school microclimate has on student engagement and thermal comfort
our high school student Bryan conceptualised and masterfully conducted a workshop on the Apple Vision Pro and spatial computing for undergraduates of the elective we offer.
thank you, Bryan!
we are very happy to share that we will have an opportunity to share our students' work during the annual Learning and Teaching conference of our home university - the Nanyang Technological University (NTU).
our contribution is titled Students' appropriation of an AI-augmented tool from TVET to NTU contexts. the conference will be held on the 1st and 2nd of October 2024.
:-)
we were very happy to have spent the day interacting with members of the Maritime Training & Doctrine Command, under the auspices of a workshop organised by the Institute of Military Learning and NIE International, as we enjoyed rich discussions on foundational concepts in Artificial Intelligence and neuroergonomics, using Learning at the intersection of AI, physiology, EEG, our environment and well-being (the Life2Well Project) as a mediatory touchstone.
we thank all our participants!
Dr Michael Vallance and i are co-guest editors for a special issue of the journal Virtual Worlds.
we welcome your submissions on the theme of Contemporary Developments in Mixed, Augmented, and Virtual Reality: Implications for Teaching and Learning :-)
in October 2023 we shared our ideas on the potential complementarities between generative AI and values education.
my students and i have been working hard over the past ten months, and we are happy and excited to share that we have translated our ideas in to research that we report as a pre-print.
please do feel free to browse our intervention Exploring the potential of AI in nurturing learner empathy, prosocial values and environmental stewardship.
my student - Toh Jing Qiang - and i are excited and grateful that a paper representing his work undertaken in fulfilment of our university's Undergraduate Research Experience on Campus (URECA) has been accepted at the 17th annual International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation. The conference will be held Seville, from the 11th to the 13th of November.
the paper is titled Exploring the use of AI-augmented tools and Large Language Models in the design of a learning environment for novices in computer science.
its abstract reads:
Learning how to code correctly and effectively as a beginner is challenging in a classroom setting as coding is a hands-on activity and often, there is a great mismatch in the teacher’s availability to guide and the students’ numerous questions. In other words, there are too many students for a teacher to provide hands-on guidance 24/7. This report describes an AI-augmented Online Web-based Learning Environment designed to provide interactive feedback and guidance for students learning how to code. By following the software development lifecycle and utilising the waterfall methodology, we interviewed and collected requirements from ITE professors and students, researched and evaluated on different Learning Environment and User Interface choices, designed the solution’s architecture using SOLID and Software Design Principles (e.g.: Facade, Strategy), implemented the solution using good coding practices, and conducted alpha-testing before deploying the solution for end-user beta-testing. From the initial interviews, we discovered the common difficulties faced by beginner programmers are syntax and data-type errors. From the development phase, we discovered the need for several iterations of AI prompt optimisation to manage cost, runtime, and ensure reliable and consistent output format. From the beta testing, we saw that end-users had improved learning experiences, which revealed that a well-designed AI-augmented learning environment can help students learn how to code independently without much guidance from teachers. This research will serve as a launchpad to provide insights to those who are interested to integrate AI into learning environments in today’s increasingly AI-powered world.
are you an NTU undergraduate eligible for the Undergraduate Research Experience on Campus (URECA) programme 2024/25?
if so, please do consider applying for
NIE24005 Exploring the potential roles that game-based worlds and immersive environments play in learning
NIE24006 Exploring the development of maker dispositions in learning through open-source hardware and software
NIE24007 Exploring the role of coding data science and machine learning in the Humanities classroom
NIE24103 Exploring the potential roles of extended Kalman Filter and Sensor Fusion in Dead Reckoning without GPS data using modern phone sensors
NIE24104 Exploring the affordances for learning of spatial computing and mixed reality with the Apple Vision Pro :-)
it would be my privilege to work alongside you :-)
our team is deeply humbled to be presented with the opportunity to share our work on the affordances of Generative AI for meaningful teaching and learning, during UNESCO’s second annual flagship event Digital Learning Week, session on 'Institutional responses to the impact of GenAI on learning assessment', later this year in Paris.
Digital Learning Week was launched in 2023, building on the foundation of UNESCO’s Mobile Learning Week over the past decade. The annual event is recognized as one of the “UN Intergovernmental and Multi-Stakeholder Digital Cooperation Bodies and Forums” to convene the community of digital education leaders, policy-makers, researchers and practitioners from various organizations, including UN agencies, governments, NGOs and the private sector. Digital Learning Week presents a unique opportunity to participate in dynamic and thought-provoking discussions, dialogue and the sharing of groundbreaking ideas, and to foster meaningful co-creation and collaborative efforts to advance the digital transformation of education and to “reimagine our future together.”
Digital Learning Week 2024 aims to promote multi-stakeholder cooperation towards a human-centred and climate-friendly design and use of AI in education, with a specific focus on exploring the interlinkages between digital transformation and greening education.
To surface best practices and facilitate knowledge sharing, UNESCO is focusing on regulations or policies that have been adopted and released, projects that have been implemented at scale, or platforms or AI tools that have been developed and put in use. The selection of proposals was highly competitive as only 70 submissions were retained from more than 500 proposals received.
our session is titled Students investigating their own learning: the Life2Well Project and the development of literacies in AI and Data Science as a case example from Singapore.
we acknowledge this blessing and privilege is from God, to Whom we give thanks and praise.
we are very grateful to the Geography Education Research Collective of the UK Commission on Geographical Education of the International Geographical Union for affording us the opportunity to share our early thoughts on the affordances for geographical education of the Apple Vision Pro on their blog!
in particular, we express our appreciation to David Lambert for his mentorship and patience.
the blog entry is particularly timely given the wider roll-out of the Vision Pro (28 June for Singapore and 12 July for the UK)
thanks be to God for this opportunity!
one of the most happening communities within the geography fraternity is the Digital Geographies research group of the Royal Geographical Society.
this year, their annual symposium will be held on the 21st of June at the University of Birmingham, themed on Mobilities and the Digital. The conference will provide a space to explore a wide range of topics and contexts where mobilities and the digital intersect as well as the broader societal, cultural and political contexts in which these changes occur.
given this, i am so thrilled and thankful to God to be afforded the opportunity to present our team's early thoughts on the affordances for learning of the Apple Vision Pro.
our paper is titled Exploring the affordances of mixed reality in the design of contexts of learning through embodied cognition; its abstract reads:
In the course of a typical day, we traverse our respective campuses several times, sometimes being exposed directly to the elements, while at other times in the shade. The paths we take reflect our tacit responses to such exposure. Through our own bodily experience, we therefore develop over time a textured map of our respective campuses which - in turn - influences our decision-making in subconscious ways.
While the cost of high-end headsets such as that released by Apple in 2024 remain high and therefore mitigate against widespread adoption in contexts of learning, the fact that the company has used the headset to advance a new paradigm of computing – which it calls ‘spatial computing’ – merits examination by the community of geographers. This paper represents an early attempt to do so, in terms of their affordances in the design of contexts of learning through embodied cognition.
Be they considered a spatial computer or a mixed reality headset, the devices lend themselves naturally to the notion of embodiment, in that our auditory and visual sensory inputs are augmented by the affordances of whatever apps we are using, but also that the apps can be designed to have a certain degree of geospatial permanence within the augmented world.
We have termed this approach Learner-Generated Augmentation (Lim et al., 2018), because it describes activities in which the learners are given opportunities to augment their local environments – such as through annotating in Augmented Reality – thereby giving teachers insight in to which aspects of their local environments students find significant and meaningful. The elements in their environments which novices might choose to annotate would be different from those which the teacher (as domain expert) might choose. In the hands of a skilled teacher, such differences represent rich opportunities for discussion and mutual learning.
the annual conference of the Royal Geographical Society has been a highlight of my academic calendar for many years, and this year is no different.
i am happy to share that i will be attending the conference, during which i will be reading a paper on behalf of my students, as well as being able to share updates on our work on the affordances for learning of generative artificial intelligence (as it pertains to geography and geography education).
i hope to see you in London in the summer!
my students and i are excited and grateful that a paper we co-authored has been accepted at the 2nd International Conference on Metaverse and AI Companions in Education and Society. The conference will be held at the National Central University in Taiwan, from the 19th to the 21st of June.
the paper is titled Modelling and Optimising evolution of self-organising task specialisation in ant-inspired AI swarms.
its abstract reads:
This research endeavours to model and optimise the evolution of self-organising task specialisation in ant-inspired AI swarms, drawing inspiration from the intricate behaviour and evolution observed in ant colonies. The primary motivation stems from the remarkable efficiency and adaptability of Pheidole megacephala (Fabricius) ant colonies in task allocation, particularly the evolution of specialised castes such as soldiers with larger heads for nest defence and smaller workers for food collection. We use an agent-based simulation model, set in a grid-based environment, to simulate ant colonies tasked with collecting and transporting food. Intriguingly, colonies face decisions on energy allocation for ant production, introducing a size mutation rate that influences the percentage of ants produced with larger sizes. Larger ants are not only more energy-intensive to produce but also serve a defensive role against predators. We aim to investigate the impact of such size mutations on the colony's overall efficiency and survival, drawing parallels to Pheidole megacephala ants, where bigger heads aid in nest defence. The simulation provides a platform to study the optimal spread of mutation rates that maximises resource gathering, and through generational analysis, this study attempts to identify adaptive strategies that balance energy allocation, defence mechanisms, and foraging efficiency in ant-inspired AI swarms.
i am happy and humbled to share that i have been nominated to be part of a five-member team representing the National Institute of Education and the Association of Southeast Asian Teacher Education Network during this year's 17th Classroom Network of the Asia-Europe Foundation.
the event will run from May to November, and is themed on 'Learning about AI and learning with AI'.
ASEFClassNet17 Faculty Collaboration aims to enable academics and teacher educators to build capacity around AI in Education. this will be done through the conduct of knowledge and capacity building activities, intercultural dialogues, and the building of partnerships. the collaboration is planned with both online and in-person discussions in mind. it builds on last year's event which had as its focus digital transformation and AI. in addition to the Faculty Collaboration track, there will be a School Collaboration track for teachers and trainee teachers of secondary education cohorts across schools in Asia and Europe.
in total, approximately 300 participants will take part.
our team is excited and grateful that our early work on the affordances for learning of the paradigm of spatial computing as advanced by the Apple Vision Pro has received recognition through being featured on national broadcast television earlier today.
we give thanks to God, for this blessing.
we are also grateful to all at MediaCorp for the hours invested in bringing the photoshoot to broadcast.
we are especially thrilled that the broadcast takes place during Tim Cook's visit to Singapore!
welcome to Singapore, Tim!
as an added blessing, i crossed the 1000-citation threshold in Google Scholar today.
today our team received news that we have been invited to share our students' work on AI and mathematics education, and on environmental modelling, during the 14th annual symposium of the Mobiles for Education Alliance.
we thank God for His continued grace and provision.
this year, the symposium is being conducted as an in-person event between the 30th of September to the 4th of October, with the overarching theme of STEMtastic adventures!
The mEducation Alliance was formed by USAID in 2010. It is an international collaborative effort between bilateral and multilateral donors, NGOs, foundations, private sector partners, and academic researchers. The collective agenda of the alliance is to: highlight and catalyze promising information and communications technology for education (ICT4E) practices and initiatives, particularly in low-resource and developing country context; to reduce duplicative efforts; to promote collective knowledge-sharing, and to identify and support efforts to evaluate and scale promising ICT4E interventions.
:-)
my associate and i received an invitation to be a part of an event hosted by the University of Sydney, namely Artificial Intelligence, Policy and Education Futures.
participation is by invitation only, and the event will be held on the 18th of June.
The event is designed to bring together diverse stakeholders from various disciplines and sectors, including policymakers from Australian and global institutions, to discuss recent advancements in AI, and the evolving global landscape of AI policy and regulation, spanning regions such as the Asia-Pacific and Europe. Its main objective is to facilitate dialogue across local and global scales, with a focus on collectively envisioning AI education policies that foster ethical and sustainable futures.
we thank God for this blessing.
we are grateful to God that a paper arising from an Undergraduate Research Experience on Campus (URECA) student-project has been identified as a Showcase at this year's Research Symposium of the Centre for Information Technology in Education, The University of Hong Kong (CITERS 2024).
the paper is titled Deriving insights from historical data of Singapore with computational text analysis: a case example of the Digital Humanities.
my student Daniel K Handoyo will share his work on the 4th of May, and its abstract reads:
This study adopts a hands-on approach to the exploration of digital humanities, applying natural language processing (NLP) techniques to enhance the analysis of Singapore's historical data. The sharing is relevant to the symposium theme in that it speaks towards how domain-specific epistemologies – of history, in the present case - intersect with literacies associated with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Science. In this way, the sharing is relevant to the symposium topic of ‘digital literacy for future readiness’. We focus our inquiry on the recorded speeches and debates of Singapore’s early parliament, offering a window into the legislative priorities that shaped the nation’s policy landscape. In this study, we employ topic modeling – an unsupervised machine learning technique for discovering latent themes in a collection of documents, through the use of BERTopic, a cutting-edge framework that leverages transformer-based language models. This approach enables us to derive meaningful patterns and trends from parliamentary discourse, such as determining correlations between individual Members of Parliament (MPs) and the topics they frequently engaged with. This research illustrates how computational methods can be integrated with traditional historical analysis, underscoring the transformative potential of digital tools in supporting scholarly research within the humanities.
I am very excited to share that a paper based on my student's Final Year Project on Free-to-play games with in-game monetization: a study on the motivation of gacha gamers will be shared at the 16th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies.
this year, the conference will be held in Palma, Spain from the 1st to the 3rd of July.
the abstract reads:
There has been a growing body of work which looks at health and other pro-social outcomes of gaming. Gacha games are considered a free-to-play model of freemium games. Such games provide options for unlocking certain features or speeding up certain processes through in-game monetisation (Evans, 2016). These games involve gacha mechanics, whereby players attempt to receive a random character or equipment through spending a certain amount of in-game virtual currency – acts known as ‘rolling’ or ‘pulling’ (Britt & Britt, 2021, pp.9-10). Relatively few academic studies have been conducted to study the appeal of gacha games and their player base (Woods, 2022b, p.2). Thus, this paper seeks to investigate the different reasons that motivate gacha gamers through the lens of Self-Determination Theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 2000). 1221 participants were recruited between July 2022 and June 2023. Instruments related to SDT - such as the Multiple PSR scale and others - were administered. Results were analysed using t-tests and Pearson coefficients. The results show that gacha gamers develop a parasocial connection with in-game characters as well as form social bonds with others on online platforms. Furthermore, these parasocial relationships and social bonds have a moderately positive correlation with satisfying the need for relatedness. These results help to further support the argument that gacha gamers are not “passive victims of monetisation schemes” (Woods, 2022b, p.11) but are rational gamers (Dong, 2020) who choose how and when they roll. Future research should investigate the effect of excitement on their decisions to play gacha games.
our team was very excited today to be afforded the opportunity to share our work in the Digital Humanities with teachers from the East 5 (E5) cluster schools. the invitation was extended to us by the cluster members and the event was hosted by the staff and senior leadership of Broadrick Secondary School. it was such a privilege to share with teachers from History, Social Studies, and Geography during their first networking and sharing session of 2024.
In the course of a typical school day, members of the school community - staff and students alike - traverse the campus several times a day, sometimes being exposed directly to the elements, while at other times in the shade. the paths we take as we traverse our campus reflect our tacit responses to such exposure. Through our own bodily experience, we therefore develop over time a textured map of our respective school campuses which - in turn - influences our decision-making in subconscious ways. the mark of the skilful teacher is how to design for opportunities for such tacit knowledge to be made more explicit, in order for students to connect their everyday embodied lived experiences in authentic ways with the formal codified domain knowledge of the classroom.
In 2015, we published a paper in the British Journal of Educational Technology (BJET) in which we described an intervention where we advanced a pedagogical strategy we termed Collaborative Observation, as part of our work on the Six Learnings curriculum design framework. In this paper, we addressed the problem of how teachers could effectively manage and scaffold the learning experiences of pupils in large classes (typically, forty pupils per class), particularly when the learners are operating as avatars in an immersive environment. In that paper, we compared three different conditions, namely learners in a 1:1 ratio with a computer, learners in a 1:40 ratio sharing the use of a single computer, and traditional didactic instruction; we successfully advanced the case for Collaborative Observation: namely, learners in a 1:40 ratio sharing the use of a single computer.
In 2020, we followed up with a second paper in BJET, this time describing the construct of what we term as Learner-Generated Augmentation. The latter describes activities in which the learners are given opportunities to augment (through Augmented Reality tools) their local environments, thereby giving teachers better insight in to which aspects of their local environments students find significant and meaningful. More often than not – the elements in their environments which novices might choose to annotate would be different from those which the teacher (as domain expert) might choose. In the hands of a skilled teacher, such differences represent rich opportunities for discussion and mutual learning. Learner-Generated Augmentation acknowledges where the learners are coming from, helps make their otherwise tacit conceptions more visible to the teacher, and has applications in the sciences as well as in the humanities.
When we published these two papers, the interventions we had designed to test them were founded on two very different - almost conceptually oppositional - premises and contexts. The effectiveness of Collaborative Observation as a pedagogical strategy was proven in the context of a virtual world, while that of Learner-Generated Augmentation was proven in the context of augmented reality.
Such are the affordances of the Apple Vision Pro that they permit the convergence of premise and context from 2015 and 2020. This is what is meant when Apple advances the paradigm of 'spatial computing'.
The body’s contribution to meaning-making is foregrounded in a creative experience. Engagement of different aspects of the body, namely the physical, and the psychological aspects, in a creative experience is key in meaning-making by students.
As a wearable, the Vision Pro lends itself naturally to the notion of embodiment, in that – in such cases – the learners’ auditory and visual sensory inputs are augmented by the affordances of whatever apps the learners are using, but also that the apps have a certain degree of geospatial permanence within the augmented world of the learner.
Thus, for example, it is perfectly possible for a scenario of a field-based lesson in which the learners are annotating their local environments as they explore their neighbourhood, leaving digital notes (such as text and sketches) at locations and sites that they themselves consider significant. In the context of a lesson unit, learners could be tasked to cast or to record their screens as they explore their environments and annotate them, for subsequent post-activity discussion in either small groups or as a class, as facilitated by the skilful teacher.
my students and i are very happy to share news of a contribution we have made in response to an invitation from Professor Michael Solem over at the Grosvenor Center for Geographic Education at Texas State. Professor Solem serves the American Association of Geographers as Senior Advisor for Geography Education and Co-Director of the National Center for Research in Geography Education.
we were thrilled when he invited us in June 2022 to contribute a chapter to Powerful Geography: International Perspectives and Applications which he has co-edited with Professor Richard Boehm and Dr Joann Zadrozny.
the book assembles case studies of Powerful Geography from Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Czechia, Japan, Switzerland, the UK and the US. Samuel, Estella and I contribute our work from Singapore.
the abstract of our chapter reads:
Powerful geography has established a renewed purpose in geography education, providing a broader and normative framework for school geography. This chapter extends the theoretical underpinnings of powerful geography beyond the geography discipline by applying its lens to examine a data science curriculum as enacted in a general elective hosted at an institute of higher learning (IHL) in Singapore. Students of the IHL module were interviewed about the efficacy of their learning after taking the module. The data analysis thoroughly reflects that powerful geography and knowledge are strong positive forces for student learning. The chapter concludes by making the case for powerful geography to be given more weight in curriculum design in disciplinary domains beyond geography, as understandings of the learning sciences continue to evolve.
my team and i are very happy to share news of our third publication in the field of the Science of Learning, with specific reference to neuroergonomics :-) following our first and second publications, our paper is published in the section on Biosignal Processing in the journal Bioengineering, in a special issue themed on 'Electronic Wearable Solutions for Sport and Health'.
since April 2021, we have been working hard on Learning at the intersection of AI, physiology, EEG, our environment and well-being (the Life2Well Project), in which we aim to afford learners opportunities to learn about their own learning, while they are learning, from a citizen science perspective.
with the help of Assistant Professor Posada-Quintero in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Connecticut, we report our work in Volume 11 Issue 3 of the journal, as Application of DIY Electrodermal Activity wristband in detecting stress and affective responses of students.
the abstract of our paper reads:
This paper describes the analysis of electrodermal activity (EDA) in the context of students’ scholastic activity. Taking a multidisciplinary, citizen science and maker-centric approach, low-cost, bespoken wearables, such as a mini weather station and biometric wristband, were built. To investigate both physical health as well as stress, the instruments were first validated against research grade devices. Following this, a research experiment was created and conducted in the context of students’ scholastic activity. Data from this experiment were used to train machine learning models, which were then applied to interpret the relationships between the environment, health, and stress. It is hoped that analyses of EDA data will further strengthen the emerging model describing the intersections between local microclimate and physiological and neurological stress. The results suggest that temperature and air quality play an important role in students’ physiological well-being, thus demonstrating the feasibility of understanding the extent of the effects of various microclimatic factors. This highlights the importance of thermal comfort and air ventilation in real-life applications to improve students’ well-being. We envision our work making a significant impact by showcasing the effectiveness and feasibility of inexpensive, self-designed wearable devices for tracking microclimate and electrodermal activity (EDA). The affordability of these wearables holds promising implications for scalability and encourages crowd-sourced citizen science in the relatively unexplored domain of microclimate’s influence on well-being. Embracing citizen science can then democratize learning and expedite rapid research advancements.
we are very excited to share that our paper on The preservation of heritage in a school campus with Augmented Reality (AR) and game-based learning will be shared at the 16th International Conference on Computer-Supported Education, as part of the Workshop on Extended Reality and Serious Games for Education in Cultural Heritage and Arts.
this year, the conference will be held in Angers, France from the 2nd to the 4th of May. my co-authors are Vu Pham Bao Anh and Ying Qinyi and our paper is scheduled to be read on the 4th of May.
the abstract reads:
Serious games have showcased tremendous potential in transforming the way we teach and learn. This paper explores the potential affordances of Augmented Reality (AR) game-based learning, specifically in the context of preserving school heritage. The AR game-based learning experience is proposed to increase students’ knowledge of their school’s heritage. By incorporating digital technology and story-telling, the game is also proposed to make the subject of school heritage more tangible for the enhancement of learning. The study involves 10 students playing an AR adventure role-playing game (RPG) which uses device location within the campus of [blinded for peer review] to trigger in-game events. To assess the effectiveness of the AR game-based experience as a medium for learning, a general survey is used to collect feedback about the gameplay experience, while a Situational Interest survey collects data about participants’ situational interest, which emerges in response to the learning environment created, using the Situational Interest Scale (Chen et al., 1999). Results confirmed a positive correlation between players’ situational interest and absorption of information, shed light on the significance of game design elements in influencing the gameplay experience, and pointed to specific rooms for improvement for future AR game-based learning environments. It is hoped that this paper will contribute to an understanding of the wider effectiveness of game-based learning environments in educational contexts.
i am very pleased to have received an invitation from the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore to contribute to a workshop themed on the Digital Humanities, which the college is organising on the 11th of March.
what is even more exciting to me is that the facilitation of the invited session will be helmed by my student - Daniel K Handoyo. Daniel is a Year 2 undergraduate pursuing a double major in History and Linguistics at NTU School of Humanities (SoH). He has titled his session Digital humanities: deriving insights from Singapore historical data with computational text analysis. Its abstract reads:
This presentation focuses on an ongoing research study which adopts a hands-on approach to applying digital humanities to historical inquiry, applying natural language processing (NLP) techniques to enhance the analysis of Singapore's historical data. We focus our inquiry on the recorded speeches and debates of Singapore’s early parliament, offering a window into the legislative priorities that shaped the nation’s policy landscape. In this study, we employ topic modeling – an unsupervised machine learning technique for discovering latent themes in a collection of documents, through the use of BERTopic, a cutting-edge framework that leverages transformer-based language models. This approach enables us to derive meaningful patterns and trends from parliamentary discourse, such as determining correlations between individual Members of Parliament (MPs) and the topics they frequently engaged with. This research illustrates how computational methods can be integrated with traditional historical analysis, underscoring the transformative potential of digital tools in supporting scholarly research within the humanities.
for posterity, i am sharing the timeline that applied to my purchase of the Apple Vision Pro, from the perspective of a Singapore resident with prescription lenses.
5th June 2023
- Apple introduces Vision Pro at WWDC
8th January 2024
- Apple announces release date of Vision Pro
2nd February
- Vison Pro available in store
- book appointment for demo
4th February
- 11:30 am to 12:00 pm optometrist appointment
- 12:20 pm to 1:15 pm purchase and measurement of face
- 2:15 pm Zeiss acknowledges receipt of prescription and begins review
- 2:20 pm Zeiss verifies review of prescription
8th February
- 12:00 pm appointment for demo with Siwei
9th February
- 7 pm Zeiss ships lenses to local US address
13th February
- 4:15 pm lenses arrive at local address
16th February
- 9:00 am (SGT) lenses shipped from local address
24th February
- lenses arrive in the morning
we are happy to share that we will be afforded the opportunity to facilitate a workshop at this year's Redesigning Pedagogy International Conference, which will be held at the National Institute of Education from the 28th to the 30th of May.
our workshop description reads:
This workshop will introduce participants to an exploratory discussion on the affordances of AI for learning. The workshop will take participants through case studies of projects initiated by students, conceptualised from the paradigm of encouraging students to develop literacies in AI through hands-on activities. The workshop will be designed around the following:
Section 1: Introduction to Generative AI
Overview of GenAI: Introduce the fundamentals of Generative AI, including its common use cases.
Included in this section will be a discussion on the benefits and potential pitfalls of GenAI, especially in contexts relevant to project-based learning.
Section 2: Introduction to the Life2Well Project as a case study
‘Learning at the intersection of AI, physiology, EEG, our environment and well-being’ (The Life2Well Project) is a suite of student-initiated projects themed around affording learners with opportunities to inquire about and investigate their local environments and how these influence their physical and mental well-being. These investigations are carried out from the perspective of citizen science and maker culture, using low-cost wearables designed by the students themselves. Examples will be drawn from the Science of Learning, and from Sports Science.
Section 3: Generative AI in Project-Based Learning
GenAI as a Project Assistant: Explore the use of GenAI in scenarios like data analysis and affective stimuli generation (Life2Well) as well as in augmenting creative expression.
The workshop will conclude with a discussion on aligning projects with UNESCO's guidance on the use of AI and Generative AI in education.
we are very happy to share that we have been given the opportunity to read the following papers during the 12th International Conference on Human Interaction and Emerging Technologies, in the track on Artificial Intelligence, Computing and Intelligent Design. IHIET 2024 will be held in Venice from the 26th till the 28th of August.
The abstract of Exploring the use of the ChatGPT-4 Application Programming Interface (API) in approaching Maths problems reads:
With the evolving educational landscape precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, online education becomes increasingly prevalent. Much help is needed to provide innovative solutions to address the challenges faced by both students and teachers during this time of crisis. This paper describes an independent research project conducted by a pair of high school students between April 2023 and February 2024, under the mentorship of a senior research scientist at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. The project investigates various methods of Tesseract OCR text recognition, OpenCV image processing, Flask web development and OpenAI’s Large Language Models to improve mathematics-solving applications. Our program extracts text using Tesseract OCR, utilising it as input for the GPT-4 API, enabling a conversational presentation of mathematics problems. Users interact by inputting the image address of the math problem that they would like the AI to solve, and GPT-4 provides solutions with detailed step-by-step explanations. OpenCV improves the provided image’s quality such as making the text or diagrams more distinct to reduce the possibility of them being misinterpreted. Through evaluation by testing with different types of maths problems of varying difficulty, our findings underscore the potential for advanced language models in educational tools, offering interactive and intuitive maths problem-solving experiences. There were a few limitations encountered during experimentation, such as challenges with extraction of non-Latin alphabets and accuracy of the OpenAI’s Large Language Modules when solving more complex diagram problems, highlighting the need for further refinement to enhance the system's robustness and adaptability. Future work involves addressing these limitations to broaden the system's applicability for educational purposes and beyond.
The abstract of An exploration of machine learning and reinforcement learning to support learner well-being reads:
With the high levels of stress in Singapore, mental and emotional well-being is an important health and social issue today. Research has shown the positive effects of pet ownership on mental and emotional well-being, however challenges of owning a pet in Singapore such as pet licensing restrictions, high costs, fear of losing a pet, a busy lifestyle and even allergies may deter pet lovers from owning a pet. Thus, we propose a technology-driven solution to emulate the useful effects of pets while mitigating the challenges of pet ownership. This project focuses on designing emotion recognition and reinforcement learning models as a stepping stone to individualise responses to a person’s emotions. Our approach utilises the output from the emotion recognition model as an input in the proposed reinforcement learning algorithm. Hence, the paper first compares pre-trained and custom trained facial recognition models, and postulates the use of physiological signals via hardware sensors to further enhance the emotion recognition model. This is inspired from the ability of pets to perceive and respond to different emotions based on facial expressions and physiological signals like heart rate. The paper then outlines the development of novel K-Bandit algorithms in reinforcement learning tested on simulated reward functions, with the aim of optimising parameters for individualised responses to a person’s emotions. Since reinforcement learning is typically used in simulation scenarios, this paper works towards developing a model that will eventually learn a person’s preferences in real time by monitoring their emotional changes. To conclude, this project has showcased the feasibility of facial expressions and physiological signals for emotion recognition, and established the effectiveness of our proposed parameter optimisation functions in the K armed bandit reinforcement learning model to customise responses based on an individual’s emotions. We hope this paper can act as a basis for future works in creating a human-friendly prototype to emulate man’s best friend.
we are very happy to share that the work of our students - Edwin Ong and Liow Shang Yu - on Exploring local ornithological identification with Deep Learning has been featured in the 2023 NTU Sustainability Report.
Edwin, Shang Yu, and i would like to thank our friends and colleagues at the university for so graciously including the project in the report :-)
thank you!
we are very happy to welcome a visiting postgraduate from East China Normal University as the newest member of our team :-)
our student will be with us over the course of six months, under the auspices of the non-graduating student (research) scheme of our institute.
during her time with us, she will undertake activities themed on Exploring the use of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science for student-centred learning.
we look forward to a mutual time of learning from each other :-)
this morning, our team was very fortunate to be afforded an opportunity to share our students' work on Data Science, AI, and neuroergonomics to 'A'-level Biology teachers.
the sharing was facilitated under the auspices of the in-service course INS2234 Use of microbus and sensors in A-level Biology practical work, and was held at the Science Education Laboratory II of the National Institute of Education (NIE).
our team is very grateful to the Natural Sciences & Science Education Academic Group of the NIE, for extending their trust and hospitality.
:-)
i am thrilled to share that my friend and brother Alex Wang has just had a volume he has been working tirelessly on - namely, the report on the UNESCO / SEAMEO Round Table on Generative AI and Education in Asia-Pacific Empowering Minds: A Round Table on Generative AI and Education in Asia-Pacific - has just been published.
the roundtable took place in Bangkok in November.
well done, Alex!
I am thankful to God to share that this year, my student Tan Yi Hong has won the highest award he was eligible for - 'Highly Commended' in the Psychology category - in the Global Undergraduate Awards 2023. Yi Hong's...
my students and i are thrilled to share that we have been given the opportunity to share their work through a paper to be read at this year's 16th International Conference on Education, Research and Innovation (ICERI) :-)
this year's conference will take place as a hybrid event in Seville, from the 13th till the 15th of November.
Biodiversity education through citizen science: a case study of student-driven ornithological identification with deep learning is co-authored with Edwin Ong and Shang Yu Liow. its abstract reads:
Only 4.5 percent of Singapore's land area is set aside as nature reserve. Despite this, Singapore is an important stopover point for more than forty species of migratory birds along both the Central Asian Flyway and the East Asian - Australasian Flyway. The birds are attracted to the wetlands and mudflats of the island-nation.
The Internet of Things (IoT) has afforded the investigation of geographies at scales that have hitherto not been practicable. The relatively low cost of open-source hardware means that localized spaces can potentially be saturated with IoT sensors, with the resulting datasets analysed through modelling in Data Science. Vey and Storring (2022) have appropriated the term ‘hyperlocal’ to refer to “place governance in a fragmented world”, by which they describe the distinct geographies of places at the scale of downtowns, waterfronts, and innovation districts.
This paper reports an independent research project conducted by a pair of high school students between April 2022 and March 2023, under the mentorship of a senior research scientist at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. It is inspired by Sustainable Development Goals 4 and 15 – namely ‘Quality Education’ and ‘Life on Land’ – of the United Nations. The paper documents the identification and evaluation of Deep Learning Models in ornithological identification.
In a presentation at the 2020 Geography Teacher Educators’ Conference hosted by the Geographical Association of the United Kingdom, Witt has described the hyperlocal as referring to “a very small geographical community, such as … a local patch”. Similarly, Matthews (2020) has suggested to us that the pandemic has catalysed renewed interest in the hyperlocal and in personal geographies.
This paper aims to explore the intersections of such geographies (of the hyperlocal and personal) through the lenses afforded by Data Science and the Internet of Things. Specifically, the capabilities of two neural network frameworks, VGG16 and InceptionV3, were identified due to their ability to build image classification models. The models were trained on publicly available datasets comprising more than 70000 images, representing more than 400 species. By the end of the project, the iteration of the model achieved a validation accuracy of 73.04% on forty locally sighted species. As an example of misidentification, an image of a juvenile Barred Eagle-Owl was classified as a White-headed Fish Eagle due to the similar white colouration. The bird prediction could be impacted by the lack of a variety of training data which represents the bird at all stages of its life, all while including images of both genders. A web-based service which linked to the external Singapore Birds Project was subsequently designed as a proof of concept for future scaling.
my students and i are very happy to be presented with the opportunity to share our work in neuroergonomics on Learning at the intersection of AI, physiology, EEG, our environment and well-being (the Life2Well Project) to a small team of...
today my students Jing Peng Lee and Bruce Yu were given the opportunity to share their work on their development of a maker-centric hardware prototype and deep learning model sleep analysis system to members of the Learning Sciences & Innovation...
we are truly humbled to be part of a team from Khoo Teck Puat Hospital, the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine (Nanyang Technological University), and MAGES Studio Pte Ltd, who have just been awarded funding under the auspices of...
our team is deeply humbled to be presented with the opportunity to share our work on the affordances of generative AI for meaningful teaching and learning, during UNESCO’s first annual flagship event Digital Learning Week, international forum on the implications...
are you an NTU undergraduate eligible for the Undergraduate Research Experience on Campus (URECA) programme 2023/24? if so, please do consider applying for NIE23075 Exploring the potential roles that game-based worlds and immersive environments play in learning NIE23076 Exploring the...
today sees the start of two-and-a-half weeks' of commemorative events (collectively known as SL20B) celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the main grid of Second Life coming out of beta :-) the annual celebrations are always something i look forward to,...
as a follow-up to this post from February 2021, in which i shared news of a collaboration between our team and the Department of Student Development at the Singapore Polytechnic, i would like to update that the department has incorporated...
i am thrilled to share that we have been given the opportunity to share our work through two papers to be read at this year's International Conference on Health and Social Care Information Systems and Technologies :-)
this year's conference will take place as a hybrid event in Porto, from the 8th till the 10th of November.
An investigation on the effects of different types of odours on stress level of high school students when studying is co-authored with Wu Xinyue. its abstract reads:
In view of the mental health issues among adolescents in Singapore, aromatherapy is proposed to mitigate their stress level when studying. An experiment was conducted both in the classroom and home setting, to test the effectiveness of the give odours, lavender, rosemary, ylang-ylang, lemon and bergamot on reducing stress level, using the no odour scenario as control. Objective data (SpO2, heart rate and stress score) is collected using the HUAWEI Band 6 smartwatch. Subjective data was self-reported by the participants through Google forms, rating their emotional health on a 10-point scale and elaborating in prose. It was found that the anti-anxiety effects of the stimulants (lemon, bergamot, rosemary) were much larger than that of the sedatives (lavender, ylang-ylang). In particular, lemon showed the best objective anxiolytic effect, while bergamot was the best in terms of self-perceived effect. Rosemary relieved stress through raising productivity, but some effects of overworking were observed. On the other hand, ylang-ylang showed inconsistent effects, while lavender was not suitable to relieve stress when studying.
Designing and prototyping of AI-based real-time mobile detectors for calisthenic push-up exercise is co-authored with Zhang Xiyuan and Shawn Han. its abstract reads:
Fitness exercises, including push-ups, are very beneficial to personal health. Many Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based fitness trainers are developed based on human pose estimation models or assisted by Internet of Things (IoT) devices. However, many of them require access to a graphing processing unit (GPU) for model training or IoT sensors to deploy, less accessible for individuals. In our work, we designed and prototyped real-time mobile push-up detectors using three distinctive approaches: (1) Push-up pose classification, (2) Angle-heuristic estimation and (3) Optical flow detection. We trained our deep-learning model with over 2000 images to achieve a high accuracy for real time deployment. Models are tested on our video dataset applied data augmentation techniques to simulate real-world environmental conditions to evaluate model performance based on accuracy metrics (precision, recall, F1 score) and processing frame rate (FPS). From the results, we concluded that the angle-heuristic estimation method has the best overall performance and we analysed the reasons for the relatively poorer performance of the push-up pose classification and optical flow detection methods. All methods developed are capable of working on mobile devices without the need of GPU or IoT sensors.
i was privileged to play a part in hosting a visiting delegation of Filipino educators today, under the auspices of The Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization – Regional Center for Educational Innovation and Technology (SEAMEO Innotech).
SEAMEO Innotech was established in January 1970 to identify and help solve common and unique education problems in the region, as well as assist SEAMEO Member Countries in identifying solutions to their individual educational problems and needs.
the visit was under the aegis of the 9th Flexible Learning Tutor Capacity Building, and saw thirty participants from various universities from across the Philippines.
Our team is extremely excited to embark on a collaboration as Co-Principal Investigator with a Senior Lecturer at the University of Malaya on a project investigating Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in language learning.
The collaboration is taking place under the auspices of the Presidents’ Forum of Southeast and South Asia and Taiwan Universities (SATU) Joint Research Scheme 2023, the results of which were announced today. The SATU Presidents' Forum International Secretariat launched the SATU Joint Research Scheme (or SATU JRS) in 2012 to provide a collaborative platform that facilitates academic research cooperation among SATU member universities. It serves as a matching platform where scholars from different SATU member universities can connect with like-minded researchers and form research collaborations together.
Together, we will conduct a study titled The role of Artificial Intelligence in aiding learning and development of academic writing skills. Our partner is a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics of the University of Malaya.
my team was thrilled this morning to learn that a citizen science project conceptualised, designed, and enacted by a pair of our students on using deep learning in the identification of ornithological species has been featured in the 15th May 2023 issue of the schools-focussed newspaper IN. IN is a publication of the Singapore Press Holdings (SPH).
Singapore is an important stopover for migratory bird species between the northern and southern hemispheres each year. This is particularly significant given the highly urbanized nature of the landscape in the island-state. Species biodiversity can therefore be high, with seasonal fluctuations. Keeping accurate records of biodiversity is important is aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Birdwatching has always been a globally-enjoyed pastime, and recently, it has been rising in popularity, particularly among the young. Birdwatching promotes exercise, generates high-quality research-grade data of paramount importance to conservation efforts, and enables people to connect to wildlife. However, accurately identifying a particular species of a bird out of the thousands in one’s local area can prove to be quite challenging, and a book identification book or application is deemed essential for any novice birdwatcher.
the Straits Times schools department launched in 2005 with a mission to engage young readers with stories about them. IN accompanies the Straits Times (which is Singapore's main English broadsheet) to secondary schools each week. IN is designed:
- to be in tune with young Singaporeans;
- to bridge current affairs with young people's understandings of the issues of the day; and
- to inspire original content based on giving young people a voice.
we are really very grateful to the editorial and writing team at the SPH.
to God be the Glory.
:-)
i am happy to share that my team and i have published a paper documenting their work themed on music education in Education Sciences, 13(5), in the section Technology enhanced education, in the special issue Game-based learning and gamification for education - series 2.
our paper is titled Melody Mystery: learning music theory through escape room puzzles, and its abstract reads:
This paper explores the use of escape room puzzles and instructional scaffolding in teaching novice learners about basic music theory. This study used Shaffer's epistemic frames in games as the basis for its experiment, combined with the use of technology-based scaffolding. We examined how effective it is to engage and motivate novice learners when they are made to mimic the role of an expert in music and solve problems using knowledge and skills in the subject. We find positive responses from participants’ attitudes toward music theory and the ability to retain knowledge of the subject, as well as evidence that proves games can have significant effects on motivation in the learning process.
we are grateful to God that a paper arising from an Undergraduate Research Experience on Campus (URECA) student-project has been identified as a Showcase at this year's Research Symposium of the Centre for Information Technology in Education, The University of Hong Kong (CITERS 2023).
the paper is titled Improving Code Readability For Novice Coders: a Tool For Actionable Feedback, and is affiliated with a Tertiary Research Fund grant that we were awarded by the Ministry of Education, Singapore, last year.
its abstract reads:
The readability of code is a common issue that affects novice coders. This paper describes a tool that provides actionable feedback on code readability. The tool identifies a set of actionable features and uses them to train a model that can provide useful feedback to novice coders. The tool complements existing automated tools used for code correctness. This paper offers a practical solution for helping novice coders to become more proficient in coding.
i am thrilled to share that we have been given the opportunity to share our work through two papers to be read at this year's annual conference of the Royal Geographical Society :-)
this year's conference will take place as a hybrid event in London, from the 29th of August till the 1st of September.
our paper is titled Exploring the utility of deep learning in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to infer socio-economic development, and represents my team's first foray in the intersection of Data Science, AI and GIS. it is scheduled to be read on the 31st of August, in the session on Data and development.
Exploring Ornithological Identification with Deep Learning is co-authored with Edwin Ong and Shang Yu Liow. its abstract reads:
Only 4.5 percent of Singapore's land area is set aside as nature reserve. Despite this, Singapore is an important stopover point for more than forty species of migratory birds along both the Central Asian Flyway and the East Asian - Australasian Flyway. The birds are attracted to the wetlands and mudflats of the island-nation. This paper reports an independent research project conducted by a pair of high school students between April 2022 and March 2023, under the mentorship of a senior research scientist at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. It documents the identification and evaluation of Deep Learning Models in ornithological identification. Specifically, the capabilities of two neural network frameworks, VGG16 and InceptionV3, were identified due to their ability to build image classification models. The models were trained on publicly available datasets comprising more than 70000 images, representing more than 400 species. By the end of the project, the iteration of the model achieved a validation accuracy of 73.04% on forty locally sighted species. As an example of misidentification, an image of a juvenile Barred Eagle-Owl was classified as a White-headed Fish Eagle due to the similar white colouration. The bird prediction could be impacted by the lack of a variety of training data which represents the bird at all stages of its life, all while including images of both genders. A web-based service which linked to the external Singapore Birds Project was subsequently designed as a proof of concept for future scaling.
Designing an Autonomous Platform using Hobbyist Robotics Embedded Computing for Performing Geospatial 3D Mapping is co-authored with Christopher Cheng and Yi Xin Ong. its abstract reads:
Typical use cases of geospatial 3D mapping relate to outdoor environments, where virtual navigation platforms are generated via satellite and aerial imagery, and photogrammetry. Much remains to be discovered about mapping indoor environments, where data may not be readily accessible over long periods of time. This paper describes an independent research project conducted by a pair of high school students between April 2022 and March 2023, under the mentorship of a senior research scientist at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. The project investigated remote sensing methods of Light Detection and Ranging sensors (LiDAR), as well as computer vision functionalities of the NVIDIA Jetson Nano, which is a compact microcomputer ideal for machine learning applications. More specifically, through the utilisation of open-source hardware and software, the project aimed to design a mapping device by pairing autonomous robot navigation with map plotting and depth maps. The device organised and interpreted data sourced from Raspberry Pi cameras and a 360° LiDAR fitted onto a mobile platform. Depth perception models and mapping algorithms were explored as precedent for comparing their accuracy in data collection and efficacy in map generation. LiDAR systems - particularly those implemented for large-scale, outdoor scenarios - are costly to maintain. Although a LiDAR system with more available optical power has increased accuracy, it is also more expensive to operate. Nevertheless, autonomous platforms surpass manual labour in 3D mapping. By scheduling timely deployment of the mapping device, up-to-date information and visual representations of a mapped region could be more easily obtained.
we are happy and excited to share our students' work on biodiversity education, as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Department of Biology, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Konstantin Preslavsky University of Shumen, on the 22nd of April.
my students Edwin Ong and Shang Yu Liow will be sharing our paper Facilitating student inventiveness and inquiry: a case example from STEM, as part of the the 11th Student Scientific Conference, themed on ‘Ecology and the Environment’, in the section ‘Environmental education, Biodiversity, Cell biology, Technology’.
we are very grateful to our friends at the Biology Department for extending the invitation to us :-)
today our team received news that we have been invited to share our students' work on biodiversity education and the investigation of sleep quality during the 13th annual symposium of the Mobiles for Education Alliance.
we thank God for His continued grace and provision.
this year, the symposium is being conducted as a series of online events, with the overarching theme of Inspiring the next generation of STEM leaders - everywhere!
The mEducation Alliance was formed by USAID in 2010. It is an international collaborative effort between bilateral and multilateral donors, NGOs, foundations, private sector partners, and academic researchers. The collective agenda of the alliance is to: highlight and catalyze promising information and communications technology for education (ICT4E) practices and initiatives, particularly in low-resource and developing country context; to reduce duplicative efforts; to promote collective knowledge-sharing, and to identify and support efforts to evaluate and scale promising ICT4E interventions.
:-)
we are very happy to share that we have been given the opportunity to share our work through two papers to be read during the 15th annual International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies. The conference will be held in Palma de Mallorca from the 3rd till the 5th of July.
Utilising deep learning in Singapore primary school mathematical word problems is co-authored with Jing Zeng and James D Tan. its abstract reads:
In the regularly held Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) surveys, Singapore has performed consistently well. Singapore Math is a teaching approach originally developed by the country's Ministry of Education in the 1980s for its public schools. Since then, Singapore Math has been widely adopted in various forms around the world over the past twenty years.This paper describes an independent research project conducted by a pair of high school students under the mentorship of a senior research scientist from the National Institute of Education, Singapore, from April 2022 till March 2023. It describes a deep neural solver which the students designed and trained to solve Singapore mathematics word problems and to provide equations as explanation. In contrast to common approaches of plainly using the Math23K dataset, we translated the large dataset into English and inserted Singaporean Mathematics word problems that came from test papers and assessment books. By using an Encoder-Decoder model which uses recurrent neural networks (RNN), we fed the processed datasets into the model and evaluated the performance of the model based on different question types. Within the timeframe mandated by the research project, we were able to achieve an accuracy of the model for the Math23K dataset of 37.4%. The accuracy was lower for Singapore Mathematical word problems. The lower accuracy can be attributed to the model learning mainly Mathematical problems from a dataset derived from a non-Singaporean context, with the consequence that it was not able to sufficiently identify the new question types. The model performed best with “More than, Less than, As many as” questions, achieving an accuracy of 35%.
Music Mystery: learning music theory through escape room puzzles is co-authored with Kim Mai Truong and Yuxuan Wu. its abstract reads:
Music theory is essential for one to understand how a music piece is constructed. It is not only theoretical but also practical, providing the fundamentals for playing and composing music. For novices who are learning music, music theory poses a challenge due to the large corpus of potential information to be learned, and its technical nature. Thus, despite the benefits, novice learners can be demotivated and refrain from learning and understanding music theory, which is a challenge for educators. This paper describes an independent research study conducted by a pair of high school students under the mentorship of a senior research scientist from the National Institute of Education, Singapore, from April 2022 till March 2023. The study explored the use of escape room puzzles and instructional scaffolding in teaching novice learners about basic music theory. This study used Shaffer's (2005) epistemic frames in games as the basis for its experiment, combined with the use of technology-based scaffolding. The escape room, “Melody Mystery'', was made and conducted using Scratch, a website for creating games. Puzzles in the form of escape rooms were used due to their role-playing elements, which served to advance the in-game narrative of ‘novice-as-expert’. We examined how effective it was to engage and motivate novice learners when they were made to appropriate the role of an expert in music and solve problems using knowledge and skills from the domain. We found positive responses from participants’ attitudes toward music theory and their ability to retain knowledge of the subject, as well as evidence that suggests games can have significant effects on motivation in the learning process.
my team and i are happy and excited to share that we have been invited to be part of the teaching team of the National Institute of Education's Certificate Programme in STEM Curriculum Development, in its inaugural semester later this year.
specifically, we will co-teach part of INS4423, a 4 AU course titled Approaches and Emerging Technologies in STEM Education. INS4423 is designed to help participants to acquire some basic knowledge about emerging technologies in STEM fields and ways to integrate them into the design of STEM lessons in their capstone project.
the course description of INS4423 reads: STEM curriculum should ideally provide learning contexts for students to acquire cross-disciplinary knowledge in authentic and applied contexts. STEM inventions and innovations are constantly emerging and evolving and hence, having current knowledge of emerging technologies in STE fields will be useful in STEM curriculum design, teaching and assessment. In this course, participants will acquire basic knowledge about emerging technologies in STEM fields and apply them to the design of integrated STEM lessons. They will explore different types of cognitive processes in STEM inquiry to create problem-, solution- and user-centric STEM curriculum for students.
the STEM Curriculum Development certification is hosted by meriSTEM@NIE.
The objectives of the Certificate in STEM Curriculum Development are to provide professional development for teachers to:
- strengthen teacher readiness to teach integrated STEM lessons by equipping them with theoretical knowledge and practical skills required to design and enact cross disciplinary STEM lessons in an authentic and applied manner; and
- establish a team of STEM educators who take leadership in supporting and nurturing other STEM educators to develop STEM curricular and teaching competencies in formal and informal learning contexts.
we give thanks to God for this opportunity.
:-)
i am thrilled to share the following, on behalf of my student Tan Yi Hong, from the School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University:
*****
“They are just 2D pixels” Understanding the Motivation behind Gacha Gamers
I recently completed my psychology undergraduate final year project and am excited to share about my findings. This is a topic close to my heart and I hope the findings can help provide further insight into gacha games and gacha gamers.
The entire project took about a year (including literature review) and I would like to thank my supervisors Associate Professor Joyce Pang and Dr Kenneth Y T Lim for their continuous guidance and supervision.
If you are interested in reading, you may access it in the Digital Repository of NTU. If you are unable to access, feel free to message or email me, I can send you a copy for reading.
Its abstract reads:
Gacha games are a form of video games that have grown in popularity in recent years. Considerable research has been done on the gambling aspect of gacha mechanisms, with some criticising it as exploitative. However, these studies tend to portray gacha gamers as passive consumers and fail to recognise the different reasons for gaming. This paper seeks to investigate the motivation behind gacha gaming. Study 1 examines whether the identity of a gacha gamer would influence their gaming habits and found that gacha gamers are neither stereotyped nor stigmatised. Studies 2 and 3 apply self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000) to examine motivations for gacha gaming. Study 2 utilised a quantitative study and found that playing gacha games satisfies the three needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. However, these needs are not satisfied by in-game gacha mechanics. Study 2 also found that connection with other players and the formation of parasocial relationships with in-game characters satisfy the need for relatedness. Study 3 utilised a qualitative interview study and found similar results through the lived experiences of gacha gamers. Together, these findings help to explain the motivations behind gacha gaming and provide foundations for future research.
we are very happy to share that we have been given the opportunity to share our work on Learning at the intersection of AI, physiology, EEG, our environment and well-being (the Life2Well Project) during the 10th International Conference on Human Interaction & Emerging Technologies in the track on Human-computer interaction. IHIET 2023 will be held in Nice from the 22nd till the 24th of August.
Designing for the investigation of microclimate stressors and physiological and neurological responses from the perspective of maker culture is co-authored with Nguyen Duc Minh Anh and Nguyen Thien Minh Tuan. its abstract reads:
The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) resulted in the Glasgow Climate Pact. Initial work in the study reported in this paper investigated relationships between environment and physiological measurements using smartwatches, and self-designed bespoke environmental modules which are wearable around the waist. Data from this initial phase was analysed with a Random Forest regression model. The next phase of this project involves neurophysiological measurement, specifically electroencephalography (EEG). EEG was introduced to the model to explore how the changes in environmental or biometric measurements correlate with changes in neurophysiological measurements. In this latter phase, EEG data is viewed as an independent data type that is distinct from environmental and other physiological data. The headset model used to record EEG data is again a bespoke hand-made design, comprising a combination of biosensing board and electrodes from OpenBCI and widely available items like adhesive tapes and staples. A subsequent step involved validation of this DIY EEG headset data against research grade equipment, of which the analysis of different features of EEG data have shown to be of statistically comparable trends. For data collection, all data recorded is stored in Google Drive; Python is used to synchronize, pre-process data and train regression models. The first headset prototype was assembled in mid-October 2021, and was tested and developed in early November. From mid-November to late January 2022, the authors wore the devices for one to two hours per day to collect data. For EEG data, eight channels were recorded, basic filters (bandpass and notch) and REST re-referencing are applied. In this project, EEG time-series are used as input in regression models with other data types as output. Two regression models were trained then compared, the first being convolutional neural network with pre-built architecture and the other being a Random Forest model with features extracted from EEG time-series. Inferences are made from the models using open-source interpreters, with an eventual aim to infer how one’s local environment might impact one’s emotions and health. The results suggest that sound level, carbon dioxide concentration, and dust concentration feature more importantly in the regression models trained on collected datasets. These factors were continually associated with high feature importance scores in the EEG data signal and in both the objective scores recorded from the electronic instruments and the more subjective self-report forms. Furthermore, it was found that visual stimulus and problem processing, in terms of information, touch, and spatial relationships, are the most influential factors affecting the participants’ physiological well-being in this research. Most recently, one aspect that is currently being investigated is electrodermal activity (EDA). EDA is marker of sympathetic network activity (Zangróniz et al., 2017). As such, it is an indication of human stress and emotion arousal, (Rahma et al., 2022). It is hoped that analyses of EDA data will further strengthen the emerging model describing the intersections between local microclimate and physiological and neurological stress. Early validation experiments comparing DIY EDA devices against research-grade Empactica E4 sets have shown promising results.
my team and i are thrilled to share that - by God's grace - we have been afforded the rare opportunity to share our work on Learning at the intersection of AI, physiology, EEG, our environment and well-being (the Life2Well Project) as part of a learning webinar series organised by UNESCO for the benefit of its global network of education stakeholders: ESD-Net 2030. The webinar will be held on the 30th of March, and our work will be shared alongside parallel sessions facilitated by the Association for Learning Design and Sustainable Development (represented by Maria Toro-Troconis and Norita Ahmad), the OPEDUCA Project (represented by Jos Eussen), and the International Association of Universities (represented by Hilligje van't Land and Isabel Toman).
ESD-Net 2030 was set up in October 2022 to take the lessons learned from the Global Action Programme and subsequently facilitate the implementation of the Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) for 2030 framework and its roadmap. To this end, the webinar series is designed with a focus on sharing and strengthening pedagogical approaches and key competencies in ESD. The March webinar will be opened by the Chief of Section of ESD, Education Sector, UNESCO - Jun Morohashi - and facilitated by Mark Manns, Sarah Margono, and Takanori Kusaka.
for our particular project, we describe the scope of our session thus:
Have you wondered how we may nurture values among our students in support of sustainable development? What about how curricula may be designed to develop climate literacy among youth and the leaders of tomorrow? In this workshop, you will hear the voices of young people themselves, as they share four examples of how they have conceptualised, designed, and enacted citizen science investigations inspired by observations from their own respective local environments. From promoting appreciations of ecological biodiversity, to understanding sleep and concentration better, to exploring the relationships between microclimatic stressors and our physiological and neurological responses - the examples all have in common that they do not rely on expensive and fragile industrial-grade equipment which cannot be taken out of the lab. Be inspired by the stories of the students as they share their ups and downs through their respective investigative journeys, and their hopes as young makers for the future.
on the 15th of April my team and i are privileged to be given the opportunity to share Learning at the intersection of AI, physiology, EEG, our environment and well-being (The Life2Well Project) at the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Asia summit to be held at the Lifelong Learning Institute, Singapore.
we would like to thank the hardworking team from FOSS Asia for kindly extending the invitation to us :-)
we are very happy to share that we have been given the opportunity to read the following papers during the 14th international conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics, in the track on Cognitive Computing and the Internet of Things. AHFE 2023 will be held in San Francisco from the 20th till the 24th of July.
Development of an Automated Microclimate Adjustment System based on Concentration Levels of Students is co-authored with Jasper Koh and Prasanna Thangaraja. its abstract reads:
The microclimate of a classroom can significantly impact the students' concentration. As students ourselves, we have noticed this. For the same subject, we are concentrated in one period, then in another, we lose our attention very easily. This prompted us to investigate the relationship between students' concentration levels in relation to the microclimate. Through machine learning, specifically through facial recognition and computer vision, we aimed to investigate the students' concentration levels based on the number of blinks per minute. While researching ways to analyse concentration levels, we found multiple studies which found a correlation between blink frequency and concentration level. We found that when people are concentrated, they tend to blink less and vice versa. The relationship between microclimate climate and concentration was analysed by measuring the blinks per minute while changing the microclimate at the same time. The microclimate conditions were varied using an air conditioner where the temperature set varied from 19°C to 31°C. The microclimate was measured using the NodeMCU microcontroller board paired with SCD-30 and HM-3301 sensors from Grove. This allowed us to gather data such as temperature, relative humidity, carbon dioxide concentration, PM2.5 and PM10 readings. From this, it was found that the most significant microclimate condition that affects concentration levels is carbon dioxide concentration. As the concentration of carbon dioxide increases, the concentration of the participants decreases. The observed trend is supported by various studies as well. Simultaneously, as the microclimate conditions were being varied, we sent out a survey to find the thermal comfort level of the students, allowing us to gauge how they felt according to the environment. Thermal comfort is when a person feels comfortable with the thermal environment. Participants were tasked to do their work for a fixed duration while a sensor recorded the temperature and relative humidity of the place. For every hour, the participants were required to rank their thermal comfort by using the ASHRAE scale. This survey identified the comfort zone at an upper limit temperature of 28.9°C and relative humidity of 68.0% and a lower limit temperature of 26.2°C and relative humidity of 83.1%. With these findings, we created an automated system to alter microclimate conditions. The place will be a conducive environment for the students based on their concentration and the environmental data obtained from the sensors. The alteration of microclimate conditions was done by controlling the air conditioner using an infrared LED module connected to the NodeMCU that sent out the infrared codes according to the conditions of the room, allowing us to adjust the microclimate efficiently while fully utilising the various modes of the air conditioning system to save energy.
Exploring The Implementation of AI in a Cost-effective Device for Predicting Sleep Quality is co-authored with Jing Peng Lee and Bruce L Yu. its abstract reads:
This report presents the development and effectiveness of an Arduino-based sleep tracking device that can accurately measure various parameters of sleep, including movement, temperature, sound, light intensity, and humidity. The device was designed to be low-cost and easy to use, while not compromising on its ability to accurately measure sleep activity. The effectiveness of the device was evaluated by collecting data from test subjects and comparing it to the data collected by other sleep tracking devices. The collected data was then processed and used to train Artificial Intelligence (AI) models such as Backward Propagation Neural Network, Linear Regression Model, and Grey Relation Analysis, to predict the sleep quality rating from 0% to 100% and to identify the main cause of poor sleep. The results of the study demonstrated that the Arduino-based sleep tracking device is an effective and cost-efficient tool for measuring various parameters of sleep. However, the pressure sensor may sometimes result in inaccurate readings, which can be addressed through data cleaning and filtering. Furthermore, the use of AI models was able to predict the sleep quality rating and identify the main causes of poor sleep with high accuracy. Further research is needed to evaluate the device's performance over a longer period of time and in a larger sample of participants.
my team and i were thrilled to receive today an invitation to share our work on Learning at the intersection of AI, physiology, EEG, our environment and well-being (the Life2Well Project) during the Innovations in Teaching and Learning (iTL) seminar, organised by the Centre for Innovation in Learning, National Institute of Education.
the seminar will take place on the 3rd of March 2023. It provides opportunities for participants to collaborate and cross-pollinate ideas, learn about new pedagogical innovations, and share best practices across the teaching community.
iTL 2023 will be held in a so-called Design-a-thon format, facilitated by the Design Thinking Framework, enabling participants to come together and discuss problems in education collectively, which in turn, brings a variety of perspectives into the discussion. it allows participants to co-create innovative ideas that lead to enriching discussions where they can more deeply understand their learners.
concurrent with the Design-a-thon, there will be a Human Library segment, which will serve as an educational platform for participants to learn more about NIE projects related to teaching and learning. this segment allows participants to listen, relate, and ask questions about the projects shown in order to be inspired to come up with ideas for their design solutions to the design-a-thon problem statements. it is in this context that the Life2Well Project will be shared.
thanks be to God for so graciously granting us this opportunity to share and learn together.
during this year's promotion exercise, two of my colleagues - Dr Fanny Khng and Dr Sun He - and i were promoted to Senior Research Scientists. He and Fanny are affiliated with the Centre for Research in Child Development at the National Institute of Education (NIE), while i retain my affiliation with the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice.
we are grateful for the support of all our fellow colleagues at the NIE.
thanks be to God for this blessing.
It has been a month since i took ownership of a BMW iX3.
This is my first BMW, and I come to the marque after a long relationship with Citroën. This latter point is not insignificant because it speaks to what I look for in a car, and – if one were to lapse in to stereotype – the two marques have traditionally appealed to quite different clienteles.
On the face of it, my particular unit of the iX3 falls squarely in to stereotype, with its Sophisto Grey Brilliant Effect paintwork, its M Shadowline trim (including the consequent absence of chrome detailing), and its 20-inch alloy wheels. The latter are noteworthy because they are shaped for low wind resistance but are of a ride-destroying diameter.
Yet they are not.
The iX3 continues to surprise and delight me, most notably in the quality of its ride comfort. With adaptive dampers under the moniker of Adaptive M Suspension, the iX3 has a pillow-soft ride and an imperious waft. There is a hushed absence of noise, vibration and harshness, aided no doubt by its double-glazing.
The supremely serene ride quality of the iX3 is at odds with the general thrustiness of its Calvin Luk-penned proportions, and I still scratch my head at how it has been achieved without being suspended through a pneumatic medium.
Beyond the enigma of its ride quality, there are many other aspects of the car which delight.
I am not generally a fan of facelifts, but I do think the tail lamps have been particularly well interpreted. Visibility from the cabin is very good, in large part due to the proportions of the glasshouse and the properly large side mirrors. These seem mundane things to discuss, but they do contribute to the overall feeling of securité de conduite.
One cannot talk about the sense of driving security the iX3 imparts, without an extensive discussion of the degree of intelligent assistance the car affords. This manifests itself not only in the headline act of Level 2+ autonomy (through the Driving Assistant Professional suite) but also through more subtle means. Two examples to do with navigation are first the way the routings on the (properly-sized) Head Up Display dynamically orientate their position to give the driver a more holistic understanding, say, during roundabouts, and second the way the oral delivery of the estimated drive time is given not immediately upon setting off (which is a time of high cognitive load on the driver) but shortly afterwards, once the car is en route and the driver has more bandwidth to deal with the provision of secondary information.
As for autonomous driving once underway, the AI is truly well calibrated. I have not encountered false positives, unlike during my test drive of the Mercedes EQC. Autonomous driving on the iX3 can cope with vehicular traffic cutting in to one’s lane, and with motorbikes weaving in and out.
As a geographer, I love that the car is not only locationally aware, but locationally aware at different scales. At the regional scale, the car is aware of its location through GPS. Such awareness is tapped by battery management and adaptive recuperation with respect to topography and the road network. The excellence of the adaptive recuperation has helped me match the official WLTP energy consumption figures. Second, at the hyperlocal scale, the car is aware of its location with respect to other vehicular traffic, using its combination of cameras and radar. Its location awareness at this scale of operation allows the iX3 to achieve its afore-mentioned degree of autonomy, including lane-changing without driver intervention.
I use autonomous driving on the iX3 on a daily basis, and it just matches the wafty demeanour of the automobile so well.
The iX3 appeals on so many levels. The petrolhead in me loves its 43 : 57 rear-biased weight distribution and the fact that it is rear-engined, rear-wheel-driven. The physicist in me loves that its centre of gravity is lower than other X3s due to its full-electric architecture. The data scientist in me loves the excellence of calibration of its AI. The geographer in me loves that its current-excited motor contains no rare earth elements.
But most of all the philosopher in me is enthralled by the enigma the BMW iX3 represents. On the face of it, this is the most powerful, most torquey, most accelerative automobile I have owned. Yet it is also the most cosseting to drive. The sheer serenity of its passage over the vilest of road perturbations is astounding. This is an automobile which weighs 2.3 tonnes yet wafts like a cloud. There truly is some magic in this magic carpet.
[with deep gratitude to Patsy Chua, Eddie Ho, and the team at Performance Motors Ltd. thank you for going above and beyond.]
i am happy to share that i have been invited to moderate during an event co-hosted by Teachers College, Columbia University, and the National Institute of Education (NIE), Singapore.
AI and Tech in Singapore and US classrooms will take place online from 9 pm to 10:30 pm (Singapore) / 8 am to 9:30 am (Eastern ST). the event brings together Dr Neil Hefferman from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Ast/P Wen Yun from the NIE.
the event represents an annual student chapter collaboration between Teachers College and the NIE; the invitation to moderate was extended by the NIE AI in Education chapter, which is a student-run organisation that aims to promote AI literacy amongst student teachers at the NIE. the team from Teachers College is represented by the Data Science and Education Association there.
i am grateful for the opportunity and for the trust extended to me.
my team and i are happy to be given the opportunity to co-host some students from the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus (CHIJ) Secondary School, with a few of my colleagues from the Sustainability Learning Lab, National Institute of...
my team and i are very excited and happy to welcome a Senior Lecturer from the School of Infocomm, Republic Polytechnic, as she prepares to begin her year-long Industrial Attachment with us. the polytechnic was established in July 2022 and...
for about a year, we have been sharing our work on Learning at the intersection of AI, physiology, EEG, our environment and well-being (The Life2Well Project). its mandate is deliberately framed broadly to encompass student-initiated inquiry in to their own...
as a follow-up to my post from fifteen months' ago, i am happy and excited to share that my colleagues and i have had a paper accepted at the 39th international conference of the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning...
further to my post two months’ ago, my team and i are really happy and privileged to welcome four college students (from a total of twenty-three applicants) to our projects offered under NTU’s Undergraduate Research Experience on Campus (URECA) programme...
my team and i are very happy to share news of our second publication in the field of the Science of Learning :-) our chapter - The Life2Well Project: Investigating the Relationship between Physiological Stress and Environmental Factors through Data...
i am happy to share the photograph below, in case it helps anyone with their decision-making. the iPhone 14 Pro (in its Apple silicone case) can be charged with the MagSafe Duo Charger. the protrusions for the camera are not...
i am very happy and humbled to share that our team has been given an opportunity to share our work on Learning at the intersection of AI, physiology, EEG, our environment and well-being (the Life2Well Project) at this year's GeekcampSG....
my team and i are very happy to share news of our very first publication in the field of the Science of Learning, with specific reference to neuroscience :-) our paper is published in a special issue of Sustainability, themed...
today our team received news that we have been invited to share Learning at the intersection of AI, physiology, EEG, our environment and well-being (the Life2Well Project) during the 12th annual symposium of the Mobiles for Education Alliance. we thank...
my team and i are thrilled to share that - by God's grace alone - we have been invited to speak as part of the programme Transforming Higher Education Leaders through Effective Policy Reforms, organised by the Executive Education department...
are you an NTU undergraduate eligible for the Undergraduate Research Experience on Campus (URECA) programme 2022/23? if so, please do consider applying for NIE22044 Exploring the potential roles that game-based worlds and immersive environments play in learning NIE22045 Exploring the...
today, members of my team and i were invited by AI Singapore to attend the launch of the AI Singapore Student Outreach Programme and Pledging Ceremony. the Guest of Honour was Minister of State for Education and Manpower, Ms Gan...
i am happy to share the photograph below, in case it helps anyone with their decision-making regarding Apple's newly launched 35W dual USB-C port power adapter :-)
this afternoon my team and i were privileged to have been given the opportunity to share Learning at the intersection of AI, physiology, EEG, our environment and well-being (The Life2Well Project) at the Digital Learning APAC Summit organised by the...
this is a simple post, but a deeply meaningful one - the opportunity for which i thank God. Seoul National University is hosting a symposium on the Learning Sciences on the 7th of July, and they have very graciously extended...
Following up from my post from two weeks' ago, projects from two pairs of my students were shared during the official launch of the AI@NIE Blueprint. Under the general theme of Student-initiated inquiry of our local environments with Data Science...
my team and i invite you to consider attending the official launch of the AI@NIE Blueprint on the 25th of May within the campus of the National Institute of Education (NIE), and we would be thrilled to interact with you...
my team and i were thrilled to have the opportunity to share our work on Learning at the intersection of AI, physiology, EEG, our environment and well-being (The Life2Well Project) with Senior Minister and Coordinating Minister for National Security Teo...
i am very happy to share the following projects from my students will be shared during the Redesigning Pedagogy conference 2022 :-) Using computer vision and machine learning with a view to building children's vocabulary Kaushal Rajesh, Alastair Pek, and...
i am thrilled to share that a paper co-authored with a pair of my students has been accepted to be read at this year's annual conference of the Royal Geographical Society :-) our paper is titled Exploring the utility of...
our team has received news that we will be able to present our paper Exploring constraints on dialogic interaction in immersive environments arising from COVID-19 protocols during this year's international conference of the Immersive Learning Research Network (iLRN), on the...
today our team participated in our first face-to-face academic exchange with visitors from overseas since the onset of the pandemic. it was fitting that the first visitors my colleagues and i have been able to host are our friends from...
today our team was privileged to be invited to share our work on Learning at the intersection of AI, physiology, EEG, our environment and well-being (The Life2Well Project) during the inaugural Commons of the Office of Education Research, National Institute...
a year ago, our team made a deliberate and intentional effort to learn more about the potential intersections between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and education. over the past few months, we have had so much to be thankful for. today was...
over the past month, we have been working on a video which tries to capture the essence of Learning at the intersection of AI, physiology, EEG, our environment and well-being (the Life2Well Project) and its affordances for STEM curricula. the...