Faculty and Staff Achievements
‘AI Sampling Singapore’ Project Wins Architectural Design - Speculative and Visionary Award at BLT Built Design Awards 2024
The ‘AI Sampling Singapore’ (or ‘3D-GAN-Housing’) project by Assistant Professor Immanuel Koh has won the best Architectural Design - Speculative and Visionary award at the BLT Built Design Awards 2024.
Is it possible to sample at scale and at high-resolution every single building ever built in a country? If so, can such a dataset be used to train an AI model in generating new yet locally compliant buildings without any explicit regulatory control inputs?
The project explores the design agency of deep generative neural networks in learning architectural notions of three-dimensional exteriority and interiority with a redesigned 3D generative adversarial network (3D-GAN) architecture.
Trained with a large dataset of 3D digital models of high-rise buildings found in Singapore, it generataes not only formally plausible and semantically coherent configurations but begins to also imagine novel and uncanny architectural forms, interpolating and extrapolating among standard high-rise housing typologies such as the slab and point blocks.
The work was previously on display at The Arts House and also exhibited at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale’s CITYX Venice Italian Virtual Pavilion.
Assistant Prof Koh is affiliated with the Architecture and Sustainable Design (ASD) pillar and the Design and Artificial Intelligence (DAI) programme at SUTD. He directs Artificial-Architecture — an interdisciplinary research laboratory that focuses on the design and development of deep learning models for artificial creativity, generative architecture, predictive urbanism and defence intelligence.
SUTD Faculty Recognised Globally for Exceptional Research in Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researchers 2024
Clarivate’s annual list of Highly Cited Researchers™ (HCR) gives recognition to individuals whose research have demonstrated significant and broad influence in their respective fields. This year, a total of 6,886 HCR designations were awarded to 6,636 individuals.
SUTD’s Associate Provost for Research, Professor Chua Chee Kai, and Assistant Professor Xiong Zehui from the Information Systems Technology and Design (ISTD) pillar are among the 108 awardees from Singapore. They were both also named in the prestigious list last year.
This is Professor Chua’s third consecutive year on the HCR list. A 2023 Fellow of the Academy of Engineering Singapore (SAEng), Professor Chua is an expert in 3D printing and rapid prototyping. A leading contributor to the additive manufacturing field in Singapore, he has over 500 publications and is recognised as the most cited scientist in the field of 3D printing, according to the Web of Science. At SUTD, he is the Chair Professor for the Cheng Tsang Man Professorship and is from the Engineering Product Development (EPD) pillar.
Assistant Professor Xiong’s outstanding research in wireless networks, Internet of Things, blockchain, edge intelligence, AI and Metaverse places him among the 87 HCR awardees in the category of Computer Science. He has also been named Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Asia Class of 2023, and has won multiple Best Paper Awards in various international conferences.
Both Professor Chua and Assistant Professor Xiong are also ranked top 0.1% of the world’s scientists in their respective subject fields in a list as compiled and released by Stanford University recently.
According to Clarivate, Highly Cited Researchers are 1 in 1,000 of the world’s population of scientists and social scientists. The rigorous evaluation and selection process draws on data from the Web of Science Core Collection™ citation index, together with qualitative analysis performed by experts at the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)™.
TechConnect 2024 Global Innovation Award
Associate Professor Desmond Loke, together with members from his lab including Dr Go Shao Xiang (SUTD PhD alumnus, Class of 2024) and Mr Lim Kian Guan, have won the TechConnect 2024 Global Innovation Award. The team from the Loke Bio-nanotechnology and Electronics-for-Large-Scale Lab has developed scalable technologies for modulating Medium-doped Amorphous Glass (MAG). This discovery makes it possible for companies to use the unique properties of amorphous glasses to make faster, more reliable, and smaller digital memory devices for use in cars, the internet of things, and AI applications on the edge.
The team participated in the Innovation Challenge, part of the TechConnect World Innovation Conference & Expo which took place from 17 to 19 June 2024, in Washington, DC. Review panel of the challenge included experts from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, NobleReach and TechConnect.
Associate Prof Loke is from the Science, Mathematics and Technology (SMT) Cluster. He researches in areas including Memristive Non-Volatile Memory, Brain-Inspired Neuromorphic Computing, In-Memory Computing, Artificial Synapse.
Find out more about the MAG modulating technologies through these related papers:
World Cities Summit Young Leaders 2024
SUTD is proud to announce that the following individuals from SUTD have been selected as the 2024 World Cities Summit Young Leaders.
From left to right:
- Dr Samuel Chng, Senior Research Fellow, Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities (LKYCIC)
- Ms Anjanaa Devi Sinthalapadi Srikanth, Architecture and Sustainable Design (ASD) PhD Student
- Dr Sarah Chan, Research Fellow, LKYCIC
- Ms Francine Chan, Research Associate, LKYCIC
- Ms Cristina Nearing, Senior Research Assistant, LKYCIC & Master of Science in Urban Science, Policy and Planning (MUSPP), Class of 2023
- Ms Angela Teo, MUSPP, Class of 2021
The Young Leaders are selected from a large number of invited nominations made by senior leaders from public, private and academic sectors. The Young Leaders are from diverse sectors and will be invited to contribute to discussions on the global urban agenda, as well as to support the next generational leadership for World Cities Summit (WCS).
They participated in the Young Leaders Symposium that was held on 2 June 2024 at the WCS organised by the Centre for Liveable Cities (MND) and the Urban Redevelopment Authority. This year’s symposium explored how we can build resilience through community building and identity, and how we can use smart technologies to build resilient and inclusive communities.
SUTD’s Young Leaders are actively researching in these spaces – such as Ms Anjanaa Devi Srikanth’s research in how the accessibility of urban spaces affects how people go through them and how they ultimately use these spaces, and Dr Sarah Chan’s research in human nature interaction in cities and how technology can aid how we engage with nature.
The current Young Leaders network and alumni stand at 550+ strong across continents, with members from both public and private sectors such as Mikko Kiesiläinen, Chief Economist for the City of Helsinki, Finland, Sean Tan, Co-Founder, Insect Feed Technologies, Estibaliz Luengo Celaya, Director, International Department, Bilbao City Council, and Brice Richard, Strategic Advisory and Smart Cities Lead, Arup.
A big congrats to these young aspiring individuals!
Audiobox Responsible Generation Grant – Assistant Professor Soujanya Poria
Assistant Professor Soujanya Poria from Information Systems Technology and Design (ISTD) and his team has been selected to receive the Audiobox Responsible Generation Grant from Meta! This prestigious grant is awarded through a highly competitive international call for proposals, where Assistant Professor Soujanya Poria’s proposal to advance audio research impressed Meta. Recipients of the grant will receive access to Audiobox closed-source models, as well as funding of up to $50,000 to further their work.
Fellow of the Academy of Engineering, Singapore 2023 – Professor Chua Chee Kai
Our heartiest congratulations to Professor Chua Chee Kai from Engineering Product Development (EPD) for his election as a Fellow of the Academy of Engineering, Singapore (SAEng) for 2023! Professor Chua joins 153 other Fellows for their contributions to the engineering landscape. He is also currently SUTD’s Associate Provost for Research and Cheng Tsang Man Chair Professor. Published in more than 500 international journals, conference papers, books, book chapters and patents, Professor Chua is the most published and most cited scientist in "Rapid Prototyping / Additive Manufacturing" (3D Printing) according to the Web of Science.
IEEE CIS 2024 Outstanding Early Career Award – Assistant Professor Soujanya Poria
Information Systems Technology and Design (ISTD) Assistant Professor Soujanya Poria has received the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) 2024 Early Career Award, for his contributions to the development of deep learning models for conversational understanding, and sentiment and emotion analysis.
An active participant in the academic community, Assistant Prof Poria serves as an associate editor for reputable publications including Cognitive Computation, Information Fusion, IEEE Transactions on Big Data, and Neurocomputing. His commitment to advancing the field of artificial intelligence is widely recognised, having received several awards including the Young Scientist Award (at the 2023 President’s Science & Technology Awards), the Aminer AI2000 Most Influential Scholar Honorable Mention Award (2023) and IEEE AI’s 10 to Watch (2022).
The IEEE CIS Early Career Award was established in 2010 to recognise outstanding young scientists or engineers who have contributed to the advancement of theory, technologies, and/or applications of computational intelligence through inventions, new technologies, innovative technical developments, new product implementations, or the management of innovative product design or production processes.