Day 2: A* and USTD

Escalation

No more excuses! Today's schedule started at a harsh 6:30. If there was any moment at which the jet lag would start making its impact, it should be now, after this much too short night. Surprisingly, there were no signs pointing that way, neither for myself (I've felt worse on ordinary weekdays) or for the students, many of who had probably also prudently decided that, maybe, just this one time, the whiskys should be kept to a bare minimum.

The organising committee has negotiated an early breakfast, which ordinarily (surprisingly) would otherwise be available only from 7:30. At the appointed time of 7:45 the whole group was once more ready to go, tieless (the dress code had changed at the last minute from Business Formal to Business Normal, a one-letter change that subtracted one tie, to the regret of no-one) but otherwise much the same as the day before.

First destination of the day: A-Star. I had mentally interpreted this to mean the heuristic-driven state space search algorithm used in Artificial Intelligence, but that turned out to be completely off the mark: it is an acronym that stands for the Agency for Science, Technology and Research. This in turn was presented at our pre-visit briefing (conducted each day by a couple of students charged with fulfilling that task for that particular visit) as a kind of Signaporese TNO, bridging between academic research and industry.

Agency for Science, Technoloy and Research

The daily schedule turns out to allow ample time for transportation: wisely, given the often unpredictable nature of public transport in foreign cities, but so far unnecessarily in the case of well-regulated Signapore. With half an hour to spare, there was time for coffee before we were lifted to (again) floor 13 of the building. There we were exposed to an exhibition-type presentation of some mildly interesting technological innovations, several of which brought Dr. Mark's yesterday remark in mind: the Signaporese are not very creative, but they know how to shop. Picture and voice recognition are of course nothing new, but the use to which you put them can still be. Our guides were not the type of persons you could ask what type of algorithm had been used for the implementation, or whether it ran server-side or client-side. More interesting I thought was to ponder the question: which of these innovations would be acceptable in the Netherlands? So many of them involve making private data public, and have potential security issues. In this way you can see tech innovation in a cross-cultural light, providing additional interest to an otherwise somewhat dull exhibition.

Max Brainwave

Another of the innovations was chemical rather than information technological: reclaiming acrylic acid from de residue of the oil palm after palm oil has been extracted. (I confess I was thinking of greased handpalms before I understood that one.) This is especially interesting for Signapore because they suffer a lot from smog caused by the burning of the 80% residue of the current processes in the surrounding countries of Malaisia and Indonesia.

On the 11th floor of a neighbouring tower we were treated to a presentation about the state of the art in detecting spoofing attempts against security measures: things like holding up a photo in front of a camera to fool a face recognition system. Questions could be asked but were in most cases not answered, or rather answered in the evasive way typical of non-confrontational countries where admitting you do not know the answer is shameful. It transpired that the research that had been presented had not been carried out by the presenters themselves.

Back to tower one, where we were treated to a demonstration of a couple of ongoing robotic development projects by two more research-level staff members of A-Star. Both were framed in terms of caring for the elderly: apparently Signapore is anticipating an even larger "gray wave" than the Netherlands - or maybe they are just more aware of it: this is a rather controlling, planning-type nation. The projects themselves did not appear to be very state-of-the-art or mature, but at least they were shown off by the guys who worked on them so we got some more enthousiasm and insights than before.

Half the group gathered together for the final presentation

The final item consisted of a presentation of funding opportunities for visiting PhD students. This was more interesting for myself than for the group, though a nice side effect was that I overheard several students say that they now realised getting good grades can actually help them in their career - the presenter had stressed that their scholarships are quite competitive.

After lunch in a hawker center vertically in between the building complex and the metro station, a rented bus brought us to USTD, the University of Singapore for Technology and Development - the place where Chris Poskitt works. Though Singapore is not that large and well-provided with modes of transportation, not all parts of the island take equal part of that. The eastern corner, where USTD is located, is not connected to the metro, and it's an hour by bus at the legal speed to which, of course, everyone is sticking.

Lecture by Aditya Mathor, Head of Pillar at USTD

We were collected in a lecture room and subjected to a series of presentations about USTD (5 year old university, aiming at 4000 undergrads eventually, no lack of funds) and some of the research carried out there. The name of Pieter Hartel was mentioned prominently: he has set up a long-term cooperation with this group, which is led by Aditya Mathur, our host of today. He explained that, rather than being organised according to disciplinary departments, the USTD has chosen a structure they call pillars, which broadly stand for application areas. He himself heads the pillar of Information Systems Technology and Design. In practice, this means they have essentially abandoned the idea that it is best for researchers who work in the same area to actually share an office: instead, different disciplines are mixed up, ostensibly with the idea that this fosters collaboration. This confirmed what Chris Poskitt told me yesterday; but from him I also learned that this fails to work in his case, the only effect being that he doesn't know any of his fellow office workers and he prefers to go and work in the library where it's quieter. I have to conclude that here is another ideal that belongs on the rubbish heap of history, alongside the notion that teenagers deep down love learning and will do so by themselves when given the chance.

3D-printed T-Rex

I hastily add that of course I subscribe to the idea that multidisciplinary research is useful and necessary, lest I be accused of ivory tower-inhabitation! It's just that, in order to be able to carry it off, you do have to have identifiable disciplines first, otherwise progress comes to a grinding halt.

Wall-climbing humans at USTD

Be that as it may, Mathur certainly has some fascinating projects going on, such as the development of a reconnaissance robot with different modes of locomotion: walking, but also rolling and climbing walls. They took their inspiration from the antics of a particular species of spider, and a very large, four-legged spider was definitely what the thing looked like. The most impressive facility we were shown is a small-scale, functional water cleaning installation, built to system test cyber-physical intrusion detection measures. All of it had either just become operational in the past year or will do so in the near future, which brought it home vividly to us that this place is indeed just getting going. Mathur seemed very very competent; with money to attract and hold people like him, this place can easily join the top.

 Chinese house donated by Jacky Chan

Although the bus was waiting, we still had a tour of some of the buildings awaiting us, which we could not now skip, at the risk of offending our proud hosts. We'd rather offend the bus driver by being late. The buildings included a fantastic 3D printing and construction workshop, a few 400-year old Chinese buildings donated by Jackie Chan, and a library without books (who needs books?) but with a collection of physical material samples so you can look at and feel the stuff you want to put into your design.

The bus driver was indeed less than pleased. Some ponderings about culture and time later. For now we were glad to get back to the hotel in reasonable time. For me, this meant I had the evening available to finish my contribution to an urgent outstanding deliverable that I had no time for before the trip, to make some dent in the collection of unread or unanswered mails, and maybe even to decrease the blog backlog.