Events
Heritage conservation, the commercial imperative, and Singapore’s placemaking – The case of Kampong Gelam
This talk examines Kampong Gelam’s transformation from historic neighbourhood to managed heritage-tourism district, tracing three key phases.
On efficient adaptation and alignment of large language models: From parameter-efficient tuning of signal-efficient post-training
ISTD PhD Oral Defence Seminar by Yao Xiao – Adapting large language models to downstream tasks and to human preferences has become the dominant cost in the model development pipeline. This thesis argues that the binding constraint in adaptation is not the volume of parameters, data, or computation available, but the fraction of that budget which carries usable learning signal – and that this holds in both parameterisation and post-training data.
Towards adaptive human-AI and human-robot collaboration
ISTD PhD Oral Defence Seminar by Loo Yi – How can AI agents and robots adapt to new human partners when collaborative data is limited? This thesis explores methods that help them learn preferences and work effectively with people across a range of tasks.
Why People Act During Extreme Heat: Motivation, Capability and Urban Opportunity
Why do people protect themselves from extreme heat, and why do intentions not always translate into action? This seminar examines urban heat adaptation through the COM-B framework, with particular attention to motivation: risk perceptions, concern, attitudes, intentions and self-efficacy.
Generative prior-driven discovery and editing of video content
ISTD PhD Oral Defence Seminar by Zhengbo Zhang – Video content discovery and editing are two core tasks in computer vision. Discovery localises an object and its keypoints in each frame and tracks the object across frames, whereas editing modifies the discovered content according to the user’s intent. Deep learning has advanced both tasks and enabled their application in visual surveillance, content creation, and film production.
Support for Climate Change Mitigation vs. Adaptation Policies: A Construal Level Theory Perspective
Countries need to both mitigate climate change and adapt to it, but limited resources mean one may get prioritised over the other. This research asks why, and finds that mitigation is seen as more desirable (having a more attractive goal, with global benefits), while adaptation is seen as more feasible (being easier to act on, with localised benefits).
Climate Justice and Mental Health in the Global South: Perspectives and Experiences in the Philippines
This lecture explores how environmental inequalities shape psychological experiences across the Global South, where communities often face the greatest climate risks despite contributing least to the crisis.
Linux security: Understanding rootkits vs viruses
ISTD COIL Seminar by Ng Hak Beng – This session will provide insights into security issues in the Linux environment, with a focus on rootkits.
All about memory
ISTD COIL Seminar by Nicholas – As hardware grows more powerful and application density increases, optimising Linux-based environments requires more than default kernel and Kubernetes settings. This talk examines the need for careful tuning, fine-grained workload isolation, and specialised capabilities to prevent noisy-neighbour effects.
From prompt to production: Spec-driven AI development with AWS Kiro
ISTD COIL Seminar by Vishesh Kumar – In this session, we explore AWS Kira – an agentic IDE that transforms natural-language intent into structured specifications, technical designs, and sequenced implementation tasks before writing a single line of code.
