Events
Yunbei Xu (National University of Singapore) – Bayesian Design Principles for Frequentist Sequential Learning
Roundtable on Global Gardens: Botanical Spaces in Literature, Science, and Sustainable Design
Two of our speakers will be familiar faces from HASS and ASD. Dr. Zhenxing Zhao (Senior Lecturer, HASS) will be speaking about gardens in Chinese poetry and art (a topic which he teaches on in his elective class), and Dr. Daniel Whittaker (Senior Lecturer, ASD) will talk about what we can learn about sustainable design from rainwater cooling strategies from gardens in India, Mexico, and Southeast Asia.
Utilising large language models for tour itinerary recommendation
ISTD PhD Oral Defence Seminar by Ho Ngai Lam – Planning a tour Itinerary poses a significant challenge for tourists, especially when navigating unfamiliar territories. The computational complexity of tour recommendation further compounds this challenge due to its inherent intricacies.
Building effective RAG applications for public good
ISTD COIL Seminar by Isaac Lim – Join Isaac, a Data Scientist from GovTech’s AI Practice, as he shares his experience empowering developers in government to build effective RAG (and more generally, LLM-based) applications.
Immanuel M. Bomze (University of Vienna) – Need to relax – but perhaps later? Reflections on modeling sparsity and mixed-binary nonconvex optimization problems
Bridging the gap: navigating the transition from design school to UX design in the real world
ISTD COIL Seminar by Samath Aravinda & Imran Nordin – In this talk, we will delve into my personal journey as a UX designer, highlighting the essential design processes that drive successful projects. We will discuss the myriad opportunities available in the field, from emerging technologies to innovative methodologies, and how these can shape your career trajectory. To enrich our discussion, I am excited to introduce my colleague, a seasoned UX researcher, who will present for 15-20 minutes on the UX research process. He will cover key methodologies, tools, and techniques used to gather user insights that inform design decisions.
LLMs for out-of-domain use cases
ISTD COIL Seminar by Anirudh Shrinivason – This talk will “delve” into Cohere’s strategies for harnessing the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) within the enterprise domain. By exploring fine-tuning techniques and the integration of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), we aim to showcase how these methods can be tailored to solve complex, industry-specific challenges.
Dr. Kishor Bharti (IHPC) – Quantum Machine Learning: What’s Happening, What’s Hard, and What’s Next
Jonathan Scarlett (National University of Singapore) – Exploration and Optimization of Black-Box Functions with Safety Guarantees
Jonathan Scarlett (National University of Singapore) – Exploration and Optimization of Black-Box Functions with Safety Guarantees
Introduction to modern LLM pre-training: Sailor use case
ISTD COIL Seminar by Qian Liu – This talk will present some key techniques in modern LLM pre-training, including scaling laws, data quality engineering, data mixture optimization, and efficient training strategies. We will use Sailor, a family of open language models (0.5B to 14B parameters) tailored for South-East Asian languages, as a case study.
