Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Spurring Digital Transformation In Singapore's Legal Industry, Xin Juan Chua, Steven M. Miller

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

COVID-19 has transformed the way we live and work. It has caused the processes and operations of businesses and organisations to be restructured, as well as transformed business models. A 2020 McKinsey Global survey reported that companies all over the world claim they have accelerated the digitalisation of their customer and supply-chain interactions, as well as their internal operations, by three to four years. They also said they thought the share of digital or digitally enabled products in their portfolios has advanced by seven years. While technology transformation is not new to the legal profession, COVID-19 has cemented the importance …

Functional Signatures: New Definition And Constructions, Qingwen Guo, Qiong Huang, Sha Ma, Meiyan Xiao, Guomin Yang, Willy Susilo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Functional signatures (FS) enable a master authority to delegate its signing privilege to an assistant. Concretely, the master authority uses its secret key sk(F) to issue a signing key sk(f) for a designated function f is an element of F-FS and sends both f and sk(f) to the assistant E, which is then able to compute a signature sigma(f) with respect to pk(F) for a message y in the range of f. In this paper, we modify the syntax of FS slightly to support the application scenario where a certificate of authorization is necessary. Compared with the original FS, our …

Sustainably Feeding The World In The 21st Century, Ren Hua Ho, Husodo Angkosubroto, Oi Hian Lee

Perspectives@SMU

Managing investor expectation, exploiting low-hanging fruit, and farmer education will be key

Transforming Businesses With E-Commerce Intelligence, Yuanto Kusnadi, Gary Pan

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

2020 had been an extraordinary year as the Covid-19 pandemic struck almost all countries in the world and created an extraordinary impact on businesses worldwide. Singapore and many other Southeast Asian countries were not spared and had to implement lockdowns swiftly. To cope with physical store closures and the increased volume of online transactions, most businesses tried to revamp their business models and set up online stores to capitalise on the rise of the e-commerce wave. With the growing trend of online transactions, it has become imperative for companies operating in the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) industry to track …

Investigating The Effects Of Dimension-Specific Sentiments On Product Sales: The Perspective Of Sentiment Preferences, Cuiqing Jiang, Jianfei Wang, Qian Tang, Xiaozhong Lyu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While literature has reached a consensus on the awareness effect of online word-of-mouth (eWOM), this paper studies its persuasive effect, specifically, the dimension-specific sentiment effects on product sales. We allow the sentiment information in eWOM along different product dimensions to have different persuasive effects on consumers’ purchase decisions. This occurs because of consumers’ sentiment preference, which is defined as the relative importance consumers place on various dimension-specific sentiments. We use an aspect-level sentiment analysis to derive the dimension-specific sentiments and PVAR (panel vector auto-regression) models to estimate their effects on product sales using a movie panel dataset. The findings show …

Do Firms Respond To Peer Disclosures? Evidence From Clinical Trial Disclosures, Vedran Capkun, Yun Lou, Clemens A. Otto, Yin Wang

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

We examine whether a firm’s decision to disclose non-financial proprietary information depends on peer disclosures of similar information. Using a sample of 5,035 unique clinical trials by U.S. pharmaceutical firms over the 2007-2014 period, we find that the firm is less likely to disclose its own clinical trial results if peers have published clinical trial results pertaining to the same medical condition. Conditional on disclosing clinical trial results, the firm is also less likely to disclose the trial results on time when peers have disclosed their clinical trial results. Our cross-sectional tests suggest that proprietary costs of disclosure play an …

Artificial Intelligence As Augmenting Automation: Implications For Employment, F. Ted Tschang, Esteve Almirall

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

There has been great concern in recent years that artificial intelligence (AI) may cause widespread unemployment, but proponents say that AI augments existing jobs. Both of these positions have substance, but there is a need is to articulate the mechanisms by which AI may actually do both, and in the process, transform work and business organizations alike. We use economic studies showing past transformations automation wrought on the structure of employment and skills (such as the favouring of nonroutine skills) to articulate a ground for discussion. We then use case evidence of AI and automation to show how AI is …

Investing For The Future, Saker Nusseibeh

Perspectives@SMU

Even if you don’t believe in climate change, shifting consumer and governmental attitudes make businesses that prioritise sustainability more profitable

Sustainable Investment Across Generations, Darren Teo, Elaine Teo, Jansen Phee, Mitch Reznick, Reshma Lalvani Sujan, Ronil Sujan

Perspectives@SMU

Children that follow in a successful company’s founder's footsteps are paying more attention to sustainability

Using Role Play To Develop An Empathetic Mindset In Executive Education, Siu Loon Hoe, Tamsin Greulich-Smith

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The purpose of this article is to discuss the importance of a role play activity as part of an experiential instructional strategy to develop an empathetic mindset among professionals, managers, and executives (PMEs) attending an executive education program in change management. This article provides an approach and process for management educators and facilitators of executive education programs to introduce and teach role play for the busy executives to learn about empathy. Role play is a useful teaching method that helps adult learners understand the importance of seeing things from another person’s point of view especially within a short period of …

Smart Contract Development: Challenges And Opportunities, Weiqin Zou, David Lo, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Xuan-Bach D. Le, Xin Xia, Yang Feng, Zhenyu Chen, Baowen Xu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart contract, a term which was originally coined to refer to the automation of legal contracts in general, has recently seen much interest due to the advent of blockchain technology. Recently, the term is popularly used to refer to low-level code scripts running on a blockchain platform. Our study focuses exclusively on this subset of smart contracts. Such smart contracts have increasingly been gaining ground, finding numerous important applications (e.g., crowdfunding) in the real world. Despite the increasing popularity, smart contract development still remains somewhat a mystery to many developers largely due to its special design and applications. Are there …

How ‘Human’ Should Robots Be?, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Hotel guests like interaction with devices that look and sound like them, but they can spark displeasure after service failures, new CUHK study shows

Robust And Ethical Data Governance Critical To Growth In Digital Age, Themin Suwardy, Melvin Yong

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

With increasing digitalisation, and companies collecting an ever-increasing amount of their customer and business data, organisations have to become more accountable to stakeholders such as regulators, customers and investors on the issue of data. Observers say expectations are also increasing, with incidents of data breaches capturing much media attention. Just as corporate governance encompasses more than just compliance, experts say data governance is more than just data protection and security but also about creating value.

Quantum Computing For Supply Chain Finance, Paul R. Griffin, Ritesh Sampat

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Applying quantum computing to real world applications to assess the potential efficacy is a daunting task for non-quantum specialists. This paper shows an implementation of two quantum optimization algorithms applied to portfolios of trade finance portfolios and compares the selections to those chosen by experienced underwriters and a classical optimizer. The method used is to map the financial risk and returns for a trade finance portfolio to an optimization function of a quantum algorithm developed in a Qiskit tutorial. The results show that whilst there is no advantage seen by using the quantum algorithms, the performance of the quantum algorithms …

Artificial Intelligence And Work: Two Perspectives, Steven Miller, Thomas H. Davenport

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

One of the most important issues in contemporary societies is the impact of intelligent technologies on human work. For an empirical perspective on the issue, we recently completed 30 case studies of people collaborating with AI-enabled smart machines. Twenty-four were from North America, mostly in the US. Six were from Southeast Asia, mostly in Singapore. We compare some of our observations to one of the broadest academic examinations of the issue. In particular, we focus on our case study observations with regard to key findings from the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future report.

Inter-Retailer Channel Competition: Empirical Analyses Of Store Entry Effects On Online Purchases, Qian Tang, Mei Lin, Youngsoo Kim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study empirically examines the effect of offline store entry on a competing online retailer in the footwear industry and investigates how this effect depends on the relative product assortment and price between the offline store and the online retailer. Using transaction data from a large online footwear retailer and offline store entry data from 19 major shoe retail chains and 3 department store chains, we quantify the entry effect of offline stores. Categorizing offline stores by assortment and price, we find that the entry of regular-price narrow-assortment stores generates a complementary effect that increases online purchases, while the entry …

Maintenance-Related Concerns For Post-Deployed Ethereum Smart Contract Development: Issues, Techniques, And Future Challenges, Jiachi Chen, Xin Xia, David Lo, John Grundy, Xiaohu Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software development is a very broad activity that captures the entire life cycle of a software, which includes designing, programming, maintenance and so on. In this study, we focus on the maintenance-related concerns of the post-deployment of smart contracts. Smart contracts are self-executed programs that run on a blockchain. They cannot be modified once deployed and hence they bring unique maintenance challenges compared to conventional software. According to the definition of ISO/IEC 14764, there are four kinds of software maintenance, i.e., corrective, adaptive, perfective, and preventive maintenance. This study aims to answer (i) What kinds of issues will smart contract …

Certis: Digital Transformation Of A Physical Security Company, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

How a company synonymous with auxiliary police injected sensors and artificial intelligence into its 21st century operations

How To Spot And Avoid Greenwashing In Supply Chains, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Research draws attention to practice of firms greenwashing their CSR by disclosing supply chain relationships with “green” but concealing “brown” suppliers

Why Do Robots Have Smiley Faces?, Mark Findlay

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The author discussed why engineers and designers provide machines with the semblance of friendliness, and why it takes more than that for humans to trust AI. The ground-breaking AI in community research and policy initiative by CAIDG, supported by the National Research Foundation Singapore under its Emerging Areas Research Projects Funding Initiative, seeks to understand how and why trust can be established when humans and machines come together.

Do Animated Line Graphs Increase Risk Inferences?, Junghan Kim, Arun Lakshmanan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This article shows that animated display of time-varying data (e.g., stock or commodity prices) enhances risk judgments. We outline a process whereby animated display enhances the visual salience of transitions in a trajectory (i.e., successive changes in data values), which leads to transitions being utilized more to form cognitive inferences about risk. In turn, this leads to inflated risk judgments. The studies reported in this article provide converging evidence via eye tracking (Study 1), serial mediation analyses (Studies 2 and 3), and experimental manipulations of transition salience (graph type; Study 3) and utilization of transitions (global trend; Study 4 and …

Digital Transformation: What? How? Why?, Chee Hau Tan, Darren Thayre, Ewen Plougastel, Mark Shmulevich

Perspectives@SMU

Leadership and prep work ahead of transformation are key

Working With Smart Machines: Insights On The Future Of Work, Thomas H. Davenport, Steven M. Miller

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this article, we share our observations on how and why AI-based systems are being deployed. We look at how these systems have been integrated into existing and new work processes, especially the implications for the changing nature of work and how it will be conducted in future with AI-based smart machines. This will help companies that are in the earlier stages of considering, planning, or deploying these systems to know what to expect from recent developments in practice. We draw our analysis from 24 case studies that we have recently completed on AI system usage in actual operational settings.

Digital Sustainability And Its Implications For Finance And Climate Change, Gerard George, Simon J.D. Schillebeeckx

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

As the pandemic forced the entire world to a virtual standstill, nature revived a little. The US emitted 10.3% less CO2 in 2020 than in 2019 and other regions similarly experienced emission declines. Depending on the source, global carbon emissions were down between 4 and 8% in 2020.2 Consumers globally have expressed more concern about sustainability, an observation confirmed by large survey research by Accenture, Kantar, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and Ipsos.3 In its latest Emissions Gap Report4 , the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) explicitly connected the pandemic to climate change, nature loss, and pollution. Besides the acceleration of business …

Outsourcing Life Cycle Model For Financial Services In The Fintech Era, Tristan Lim, Patrick Thng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In today’s financial services landscape, staying ahead of the innovation curve and being disciplined at enhancing core service offerings entail careful resource planning. A well-structured outsourcing arrangement can go a long way towards enhancing long term organizational strategic growth. In the post-2014 FinTech era, (i) strategic management with an innovation focus and (ii) financial technology-associated risks, have brought about changes to outsourcing in the financial services industry. Presently, most outsourcing life cycle models in existing literature seek to provide comprehensive, yet industry-neutral guidelines lacking industry context and depth of coverage. A newly licensed financial institution deciding to embark on outsourcing …

Explainable Recommendation With Comparative Constraints On Product Aspects, Trung-Hoang Le, Hady W. Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To aid users in choice-making, explainable recommendation models seek to provide not only accurate recommendations but also accompanying explanations that help to make sense of those recommendations. Most of the previous approaches rely on evaluative explanations, assessing the quality of an individual item along some aspects of interest to the user. In this work, we are interested in comparative explanations, the less studied problem of assessing a recommended item in comparison to another reference item.

In particular, we propose to anchor reference items on the previously adopted items in a user's history. Not only do we aim at providing comparative …

Can We Classify Cashless Payment Solution Implementations At The Country Level?, Dennis Ng, Robert J. Kauffman, Paul Robert Griffin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This research commentary proposes a 3-D implementation classification framework to assist service providers and business leaders in understanding the kinds of contexts in which more or less successful cashless payment solutions are observed at point-of-sale (PoS) settings. Three constructs characterize the framework: the digitalization of the local implementation environment; the relative novelty of a given payment technology solution in a country at a specific point in time; and the development status of the country’s national infrastructure. The framework is motivated by a need to support cross-country research in this domain. We analyze eight country mini-cases based on an eight-facet (2 …

How Do Monetary Incentives Influence Giving? An Empirical Investigation Of Matching Subsidies On Kiva, Zhiyuan Gao, Zhiling Guo, Qian Tang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Matching subsidies, through which third-party institutions provide a dollar-for-dollar match of private contributions made through selected campaigns, have served as effective tools to boost fundraising. We utilize a quasi-experiment on a prosocial crowdfunding platform to examine the effectiveness of matching subsidies in shaping funding outcomes and lender behaviors. Although matching subsidies offer matched loans competitive advantages over unmatched loans, we find that total private contributions made to both matched and unmatched loans increase compared to their prematching counterparts, suggesting a positive spillover effect on unmatched loans. However, matching subsidies lead to decreased private contributions made on the platform after a …

Traceable Monero: Anonymous Cryptocurrency With Enhanced Accountability, Yannan Li, Guomin Yang, Wily Susilo, Yong Yu, Man Ho Au, Dongxi Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Monero provides a high level of anonymity for both users and their transactions. However, many criminal activities might be committed with the protection of anonymity in cryptocurrency transactions. Thus, user accountability (or traceability) is also important in Monero transactions, which is unfortunately lacking in the current literature. In this paper, we fill this gap by introducing a new cryptocurrency named Traceable Monero to balance the user anonymity and accountability. Our framework relies on a tracing authority, but is optimistic, in that it is only involved when investigations in certain transactions are required. We formalize the system model and security model …

Portfolio Diversification Using Shape-Based Clustering, Tristan Lim, Chin Sin Ong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Portfolio diversification involves lowering the correlation between portfolio assets to achieve improved risk–return exposure. It is reasonable to infer from the classic Anscombe quartet that relying on descriptive statistics, and specifically, correlation, to achieve portfolio diversification may not derive the most optimal multiperiod portfolio risk-adjusted return because stocks in a portfolio can exhibit different price trends over time, even with the same computed pairwise correlation. This research applied a shape-based time-series clustering technique of agglomerative hierarchical clustering using dynamic time-series warping as a distance measure to aggregate stocks into like-trending clusters across time as a portfolio diversification tool. Results support …