Events
Redesigning Work in the Era of AI and Automation: A Skills-First, Human-Centric Approach
Grounded in extensive organisational practices, this session introduces a structured, human-centric, and skills-first approach to identify how functional tasks can be automated, augmented, or reorganised, and how jobs can be reconstructed into higher-value, future-ready roles.
Metropolitan Dharma: Buddhism in Global-City Singapore
This talk traces the historical development and contemporary transformations of the Buddhist community in Singapore. Beginning in the nineteenth century, it examines how waves of migration from China, South Asia, and Southeast Asia produced a diverse Buddhist landscape encompassing Theravāda, Mahāyāna, and Vajrayāna traditions in a colonial port city.
Relaxed joint chance constraints with surrogate tail bounds
ESD Research Seminar by Arjun Ramachandra – Many applications in power systems, supply chains, and transportation involve uncertain outcomes and optimisation decisions over multiple time periods while requiring high reliability. Joint chance constraints (JCC) enforce strict reliability but are overly conservative, while single chance constraints (SCC) offer flexibility at the cost of performance.
Does the System Care? Accessibility, AI and the Difference Between Technical Compliance and Relational Safety
Accessibility systems worldwide are evaluated on compliance: does the ramp exist, does the lift work, is the route barrier-free? But compliance and care are not the same thing. This talk draws on fieldwork in Singapore to examine accessibility as a relational problem, not just an infrastructure one, and asks what happens when we apply this lens to AI.
Learning-augmented optimisation for transportation, supply chain, and service systems
ESD Research Seminar by Huang Yiduo – This talk introduces Postdoctoral Research Associate Huang Yiduo’s research programme at the intersection of optimisation, stochastic modelling, and data-driven methods for complex service and supply chain systems.
Stochastic dynamics in curbside operations: Pricing, facility design, and access control
ESD Research Seminar by Liu Xinyu, Cindy – This talk presents rigorous, practical frameworks using continuous-time Markov decision processes (MDPs) and game-theoretic queues.
"Acclimations" Civic adaptation with climate changes
Join us for an evening with Dominique Cécile Jakob — award‑winning architect and co‑founder of the Paris‑based practice JAKOB+MACFARLANE.
A behavioural model for exploration vs exploitation: Theoretical framework and experimental evidence
ESD Research Seminar by Yifan Feng – How do people navigate the exploration-exploitation (EE) trade-off when making repeated choices with unknown rewards? We study this question through the lens of multi-armed bandit problems and introduce a novel behavioural model, Quantal Choice with Adaptive Reduction of Exploration (QCARE).
What can quantum AI learn from biological intelligence?
ESD Research Seminar by Thiparat Chotibut – Designing scalable quantum machine learning (QML) models with potential quantum advantage on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices remains a major challenge.
IDEAS Festival 2026 – Is A.I. Art the End of Human Creativity?
Artificial intelligence is reshaping the creative landscape, from music composition and literary fiction to visual art and design. But as the boundaries between machine and human creativity blur, we are compelled to ask: Can A.I. truly create art?
