Digital Commons Network^™

Multi-Task Zipping Via Layer-Wise Neuron Sharing, Xiaoxi He, Zimu Zhou, Lothar Thiele

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Future mobile devices are anticipated to perceive, understand and react to the world on their own by running multiple correlated deep neural networks on-device. Yet the complexity of these neural networks needs to be trimmed down both within-model and cross-model to fit in mobile storage and memory. Previous studies squeeze the redundancy within a single model. In this work, we aim to reduce the redundancy across multiple models. We propose Multi-Task Zipping (MTZ), a framework to automatically merge correlated, pre-trained deep neural networks for cross-model compression. Central in MTZ is a layer-wise neuron sharing and incoming weight updating scheme that …

Voting And Commenting Mechanisms In Ongoing Crowdsourcing Platforms: A Case Study Of Lego Ideas Platform, Khalid Murzig M. Alharbi

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Although crowdsourcing, an innovative online call to help solve problems or generate new ideas, has gained much traction in the business word, not much research has been done on the commenting and voting mechanisms. Most of the research has focussed on the why and how businesses crowdsource. To fill the gap, this research focusses on the commenting and voting mechanisms and aims to analyse the effectiveness of the commenting and voting mechanism in an ongoing crowdsourcing platform, Lego Idea. Using Python software, 8663 comments were extracted from the Lego Ideas platform. These comments were then manually categorised into 10 variables …

Social Software Development: Insights And Solutions, Abhishek Sharma

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Over last few decades, the way software is developed has changed drastically. From being an activity performed by developers working individually to develop standalone programs, it has transformed into a highly collaborative and cooperative activity. Software development today can be considered as a participatory culture, where developers coordinate and engage together to develop software while continuously learning from one another and creating knowledge.

In order to support their communication and collaboration needs, software developers often use a variety of social media channels. These channels help software developers to connect with like-minded developers and explore collaborations on software projects of interest. …

The Business Of Accelerating The Acceleration Of Startups, David Wai Lun Ng

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The cross-domain and cross-border aspects of the Business Accelerator sector has resulted in an ecosystem that has seen actors in the space jostle for clear and competitive positioning. The evolution of Business Accelerators as a business entity, seeking to supply positive interventions to the journey of start-ups, is common to all growth and innovation orientated ecosystems. The ability for Business Accelerator managers to demonstrably impact their subject acceleratees positively has been an under-researched area. Against this background is the rising volume of capital being channeled into funding startups due to the widespread drive for innovation led growth which is increasingly …

Zine 2018: A Look At The Past Year, Smu Libraries

Library Events

The file contains digitized pages from SMU Libraries’ zine-making activity. Pages are individual contributions from staff members reflecting their 2018 SMU journey.

Building A Case For The Replacement Of A Legacy Library Management System, Nilofar Maideen Shameem

Research Collection Library

This chapter presents the feasibility study conducted at SMU Libraries as part of an overall strategy aimed at engaging key stakeholders and getting their buy-in, right from the planning stage, for the migration and implementation of a library management system. The feasibility study was conducted over a period of eight months and involved representatives from various teams within the library as well as the university’s IT department.

Likely Trajectory Of Fed Policy Far From Settled, Thomas Lam, David Fernandez

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Markets seem to be assuming an almost pre-set path of Fed policy normalization in 2019, including hiking rates and shrinking the balance sheet. In contrast, we see many uncertainties ahead.

Comparison Mining From Text, Maksim Tkachenko

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Online product reviews are important factors of consumers' purchase decisions. They invade more and more spheres of our life, we have reviews on books, electronics, groceries, entertainments, restaurants, travel experiences, etc. More than 90 percent of consumers read online reviews before they purchase products as reported by various consumers surveys. This observation suggests that product review information enhances consumer experience and helps them to make better-informed purchase decisions. There is an enormous amount of online reviews posted on e-commerce platforms, such as Amazon, Apple, Yelp, TripAdvisor. They vary in information and may be written with different experiences and preferences.

If …

The Rise Of Real-Time Retail Payments, Zhiling Guo

MITB Thought Leadership Series

TRANSACTING for just about anything using our mobile phones has become commonplace, and so many consumers will be intrigued to discover that after making a purchase it can still take longer for payment to reach a vendor’s bank account than it does for the purchased goods to be delivered.

Leveraging Artificial Intelligence To Capture The Singapore Rideshare Market, Pradeep Varakantham

MITB Thought Leadership Series

BIKE-SHARING programmes face many of the issues encountered by their counterparts in the carsharing world. But in Singapore, there are a number of factors that have a unique impact on the industry. These include the regulatory structure and the significant fines for those companies who do not abide by these regulations. When this is combined with the competitive nature of the industry in one of the world's most dynamic cities, it becomes clear that first movers who leverage machine learning and prediction will come to dominate the industry

Societal Trust And Corporate Tax Avoidance, Kiridaran Kanagaretnam, Jimmy Lee, Chee Yeow Lim, Gerald Lobo

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Using aninternational sample of firms from 25 countries and a country-level index for societal trust, we document that societal trust is negatively associated with tax avoidance, even after controlling for other institutional determinants, such as home country legal institutions and tax system characteristics.We explore the effects of two country-level institutional characteristics—strength of lega linstitutions and capital market pressure—on the relation between societal trust and tax avoidance. We find that the relation between trust and tax avoidance is less pronounced when legal institutions in a country are stronger and is more pronounced when capital market pressure is stronger. Finally, we examine …

An Exploratory Study Of How To Navigate Brand Management And Improve Sales Performance Through Control Policies, Pavuth Sriaranyakul

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The aim of this study was to examine the effects of alcohol and tobacco control policies on sales performance when two central elements of marketing, communication and promotion programs, are significantly restricted. The study took place in Thailand, which has some of the strongest tobacco control regulations in the world, along with moderately strong alcohol control regulations. Under these regulations, tobacco firms operate in a dark market, with near-total regulatory prohibition on advertising, promotion, and even the display of their products. Alcohol firms operate in a less restrictive or “grey” market, as they face restrictions on advertising and promotion content, …

Pride And Protectionism: U.S. Trade Policy And Its Impact On Asia, Mark Zandi, Steve Cochrane, Ryan Sweet, Ruth Stroppiana, Katrina Ell

Asian Management Insights

U.S. trade policy and its impact on Asia.

Many of the trade policies of the United States President Donald Trump’s administration are aimed at addressing the perceived adverse impact of trade on the country’s manufacturing employment, and improving trade deals the President sees as not being in U.S. interests. These appear to be worthwhile goals, but crafting trade policy to address them is difficult.

Incentives: Achieving Business Results With The Right Pay Scheme, Fermin Diez

Asian Management Insights

Achieving business results with the right pay scheme.

Much has been said both for and against using incentives to drive business results—be it revenue and profit, or market share. Despite this, there is surprisingly little research, particularly in Asia, to guide practitioners on how different pay models affect decisions that lead to better company performance.

Credit Assignment For Collective Multiagent Rl With Global Rewards, Duc Thien Nguyen, Akshat Kumar, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Scaling decision theoretic planning to large multiagent systems is challenging due to uncertainty and partial observability in the environment. We focus on a multiagent planning model subclass, relevant to urban settings, where agent interactions are dependent on their collective influence'' on each other, rather than their identities. Unlike previous work, we address a general setting where system reward is not decomposable among agents. We develop collective actor-critic RL approaches for this setting, and address the problem of multiagent credit assignment, and computing low variance policy gradient estimates that result in faster convergence to high quality solutions. We also develop difference …

Applying Design Thinking To Student Outreach Projects: Experiences From An Information Systems School, Swapna Gottipati, Venky Shankararaman, Alan Megargel

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As countries turn into Smart Nations, Infocom Technology plays a key role in enhancing their competitiveness through high skilled workforces. Reaching to younger generations and attracting them to computing programs such as Information Systems (IS) and Computer Science (CS) is a key challenge faced by universities. Many high quality students from junior colleges either don’t choose IS programs or choose IS programs as their last option during the application process. A School of Information Systems (SIS) from a large metropolitan university decided to implement an innovative outreach program to attract high quality high school aka Junior College (JC) students. JC …

Design And Implementation Of Decision Support For Traffic Management At Multipurpose Port Gates, Ketki Kulkarni, Hoong Chuin Lau, Hai Wang, Sathyavarathan Sivabalasingam, Trong Khiem Tran

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Effective traffic management can help port operators gain a competitive edge in service level and efficient use of limited resources. One critical aspect of traffic management is gate operations management, ensuring a good customer experience to logistic carriers and considering the impact of congestion in and around the port. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a decision support tool to help gate operators plan for future scenarios with fluctuating demand and limited resources. We propose a simulation optimization framework which incorporates theoretical results from queuing theory to approximate complex multi-lane multi-server systems. Our major contribution in …

Sybmatch: Sybil Detection For Privacy-Preserving Task Matching In Crowdsourcing, Jiangang Shu, Ximeng Liu, Kan Yang, Yinghui Zhang, Xiaohua Jia, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The past decade has witnessed the rise of crowdsourcing, and privacy in crowdsourcing has also gained rising concern in the meantime. In this paper, we focus on the privacy leaks and sybil attacks during the task matching, and propose a privacy-preserving task matching scheme, called SybMatch. The SybMatch scheme can simultaneously protect the privacy of publishers and subscribers against semi-honest crowdsourcing service provider, and meanwhile support the sybil detection against greedy subscribers and efficient user revocation. Detailed security analysis and thorough performance evaluation show that the SybMatch scheme is secure and efficient.

Komida: Making Microfinance Digital In Indonesia, Adrian Yeow, Wee Kiat Lim

CMP Research

This case chronicles specific background, challenges, and actions taken by an Indonesian microfinancing institution (MFI) as it was implementing a digital mobile system to replace its current manual processes used in its field office operations. From a high level perspective, it describes the challenges faced by an organization that was attempting to implement a new digital initiative but constrained by its resource-scarce, institutionally, and culturally bound environment. At the same time, it highlights that this digital initiative was a critical part of its overall plan for addressing industry demands, increasing competitive pressures, and internal process issues. The case study thus …

Men’S Cosmetics: Challenging Conventional Marketing Wisdom, Dae Ryun Chang

Asian Management Insights

The marketing of men’s cosmetics is challenging conventional wisdom in Asia.

Men and beauty seem to be two contradictory domains because we often rely on an outdated assumption that men only want to appear manly and nothing more. The reality for modern men, however, is significantly different from that perception.

Parenting And Inequality In Insecure Times. A Comment To The Symposium, Aliya Hamid Rao

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This comment highlights how high income inequality and economic uncertainty produce new dimensions to intensive parenting amongst the middle-class. Parenting practices encourage children’sdevelopment of behaviors and values which are coveted in élite professions. Amongst the advantaged,these parenting practices encourage neo-traditional family structures as a means of coping with economic uncertainty.

Creating Singapore’S Longest Monthly Rainfall Record From 1839 To The Present, Elaine Gao, Bertrand Timbal, Fiona Williamson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Currently,the identification of decadal variability is limited by the lack of long-termmeteorological datasets; Singapore’s reliable contemporary network of automaticmeteorological stations (AWS) provides only about 30 years of rainfall data for thewhole island. In this study, rainfall data, sourced fromhistorical archives and recording monthly rainfall pre-dating the start ofofficial MacRitchie observations, are compiled from various locations acrossthe island. By making use of the contemporary AWS network, we evaluate thespatial relationship of rainfall between the historical sites and the currentMacRitchie site. This enables us to reconstruct historical rainfall atMacRitchie using the archive data, thereby building a single-location extendedrainfall record (though discontinuous) from …

An Economic Analysis Of Incentivized Positive Reviews, Jianqing Chen, Zhiling Guo, Jian Huang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

It becomes increasingly popular that some large online retailers such as Amazon open their platforms to allow third-party retail competitors to sell on their own platforms. We develop an analytical model to examine this retailer marketplace model and its business impact. We assume that a leading retailer has both valuation advantage that may come from its reputation and information advantage that may come from its brand awareness. We find that the availability of relatively low-cost advertising through social media or search engine can effectively reduce the leading retailer's information advantage, and thus be an important driving force for its strategic …

Lighting The Spark In The Philippines, Rosemarie Andres

Asian Management Insights

An interview with Rosemarie 'Bubu' Andres

In this edition, we are introducing a new section called ‘The Entrepreneur’s Corner’, in which we will present Asia’s entrepreneurs and their journeys, complete with the ups and downs, and twists and turns.

Doing Business In Myanmar: Dressing Up The Bride, Ma Cherry Trivedi

Asian Management Insights

Dressing up the bride.

As one of the untapped frontiers of newly emerging markets, Myanmar is rich in natural resources, underpopulated but with growing purchasing power, and an easy place to do business. From the outside, the country is very inviting, and there is considerable interest in doing business in Myanmar today. But internally, we have several pockets of obstacles.

Root-N Consistency Of Intercept Estimators In A Binary Response Model Under Tail Restrictions, Lili Tan, Yichong Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

The intercept of the binary response model is irregularly identified when the supports of both the special regressor V and the error term ε are the whole real line. This leads to the estimator of the intercept having potentially a slower than √n convergence rate, which can result in a large estimation error in practice. This paper imposes addition tail restrictions which guarantee the regular identification of the intercept and thus the √n-consistency of its estimator. We then propose an estimator that achieves the √n rate. Finally, we extend our tail restrictions to a full-blown model with endogenous regressors.

Forecasting Large Covariance Matrix With High-Frequency Data: A Factor Correlation Matrix Approach, Yingjie Dong, Yiu Kuen Tse

Research Collection School Of Economics

We propose a factor correlation matrix approach to forecast large covariance matrix of asset returns using high-frequency data. We apply shrinkage method to estimate large correlation matrix and adopt principal component method to model the underlying latent factors. A vector autoregressive model is used to forecast the latent factors and hence the large correlation matrix. The realized variances are separately forecasted using the Heterogeneous Autoregressive model. The forecasted variances and correlations are then combined to forecast large covariance matrix. We conduct Monte Carlo studies to compare the finite sample performance of several methods of forecasting large covariance matrix. Our proposed …

Coarse Revealed Preference, Gaoji Hu, Jiangtao Li, John K. Quah, Rui Tang

Research Collection School Of Economics

We identify necessary and sufficient conditions under which a coarse data set canbe coarsely rationalized by a linear order (or weak order). The conditions are easy tocheck, and efficient algorithms are provided. We apply our theory to investigate theobservable restrictions of several economic models including (1) rational choice withimperfect observation; (2) multiple preferences; (3) monotone multiple preferences; and(4) minimax regret.

A Dual-Process Theory Perspective To Better Understand Judgments In Assessment Centers: The Role Of Initial Impressions For Dimension Ratings And Validity, Pia V. Ingold, Mirjam Donni, Filip Lievens

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Insight into assessors’ initial impressions has the potential to advance knowledge on how assessors form dimension-based judgments and on possible biases in these ratings. Therefore, this study draws on dual process theory to build and test a model that integrates assessors’ dimension ratings (i.e., systematic, slow, deliberate processing mode) with their initial impressions (i.e., intuitive, fast, automatic processing mode). Data collection started with an AC where assessors provided ratings of assessees, and an online survey of assessees’ supervisors who rated their job performance. In addition, two other rater pools provided initial impressions of these assessees by evaluating extracted 2-min video …

China’S Belt And Road Initiative And Asean’S Maritime Cluster, Hans-Dieter Evers, Thomas Menkhoff

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper centres around China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and makes a case for further examining the possible effects of the complementary ‘Maritime Silk Road’ on Southeast Asia’s maritime clusters with reference to Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. Port development with “Chinese engagement” from Port Klang in Malaysia to Sri Lanka to Gwadar in Pakistan to some Gulf state ports to Piraeus in Greece provides a string of valuable pearls in the form of harbours from which adjoining areas can be serviced through feeder vessels or railway lines by Chinese government-linked companies. Whether China’s heavy investments in land and maritime …