Digital Commons Network^™

The Backdrop Of Leadership: How Environmental Awe Influences Charisma Attributions, Jack Mcguire, Nicolas Bastardoz, Leonie J. Hentrup, David De Cremer, Jochen I. Menges

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Charisma is often attributed to leaders based on how they look, talk, and behave. Yet very little is known about the role of the physical environment in influencing attributions of leader charisma. The role of the physical environment is crucial because leaders inevitably occupy physical spaces that vary across contexts. In this research, we find that the grandeur of the physical environment, specifically in its ability to induce awe, enhances attributions of charisma for leaders who are not already known to be charismatic. First, in a field experiment, we show that a real business leader is attributed with more charisma …

“I Can Run At Night!”: Using Augmented Reality To Support Nighttime Guided Running For Low-Vision Runners, Yuki Abe, Keisuke Matsushima, Kotaro Hara, Daisuke Sakamoto, Tetsuo Ono

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Dark environment challenges low-vision (LV) individuals to engage in running by following sighted guide—a Caller-style guided running—due to insufficient illumination, because it prevents them from using their residual vision to follow the guide and be aware about their environment. We design, develop, and evaluate RunSight, an augmented reality (AR)-based assistive tool to support LV individuals to run at night. RunSight combines see-through HMD and image processing to enhance one’s visual awareness of the surrounding environment (e.g., potential hazard) and visualize the guide’s position with AR-based visualization. To demonstrate RunSight’s efficacy, we conducted a user study with 8 LV runners. The …

Hdwsa2: A Secure Hierarchical Deterministic Wallet Supporting Stealth Address And Signature Aggregation, Xin Yin, Zhen Liu, Guomin Yang, Guoxing Chen, Haojin Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Hierarchical Deterministic Wallet (HDW) and Stealth Address (SA) are widely used in cryptocurrency communities due to their functionality and security. In the preliminary version of this work (ESORICS 2022), we formally define the syntax and security models of Hierarchical Deterministic Wallet supporting Stealth Address (HDWSA), capturing the functionality and security requirements imposed by the practice in cryptocurrency. We propose a concrete HDWSA construction and prove its security in the random oracle model. Note that when applied in blockchain, in practice, signature aggregation could reduce the cost of computation, storage, and communication dramatically. In this full version, we develop HDWSA definition …

Enhancing Deliberativeness: Evaluating The Impact Of Multimodal Reflection Nudges, Shun Yi Yeo, Zhuoqun Jiang, Anthony Tang, Simon Tangi Perrault

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Nudging participants with text-based reflective nudges enhances deliberation quality on online deliberation platforms. The effectiveness of multimodal reflective nudges, however, remains largely unexplored. Given the multi-sensory nature of human perception, incorporating diverse modalities into self-reflection mechanisms has the potential to better support various reflective styles. This paper explores how presenting reflective nudges of different types (direct: persona and indirect: storytelling) in different modalities (text, image, video and audio) affects deliberation quality. We conducted two user studies with 20 and 200 participants respectively. The first study identifies the preferred modality for each type of reflective nudges, revealing that text is most …

Oscar: Object Status And Contextual Awareness For Recipes To Support Non-Visual Cooking, Franklin Mingzhe Li, Kaitlyn Ng, Bin Zhu, Patrick Carrington

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Following recipes while cooking is an important but difficult task for visually impaired individuals. We developed OSCAR (Object Status Context Awareness for Recipes), a novel approach that provides recipe progress tracking and context-aware feedback on the completion of cooking tasks through tracking object statuses. OSCAR leverages both Large-Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to manipulate recipe steps, extract object status information, align visual frames with object status, and provide cooking progress tracking log. We evaluated OSCAR’s recipe following functionality using 173 YouTube cooking videos and 12 real-world non-visual cooking videos to demonstrate OSCAR’s capability to track cooking steps and …

The Effects Of Income On Infant Health: Evidence From The Coal Boom And Bust, Chu Gek Chew

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

An individual’s health at birth is an important component in human capital accumulation, posing significant implications both in the short- and long-run. I investigate how infant health outcomes were impacted during a period of successive positive and negative economic shocks led by the coal industry between the 1970s to 1990s. Using exogenous variation within counties’ pre-existing coal reserves, I instrument for the changes in economic opportunities during the coal boom and bust. I find some limited evidence that an increase in income improves infant health outcomes. The incidence of low birthweight is decreasing in earnings growth, and effects are stronger …

Nature Of Smartphone Use: The Underlying Mechanisms Between Nature Exposure And Urge To Use Social Media, Jia Yi Aw

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The urge to use social media is prevalent and costly in modern society. However, little has been researched on how nature exposure can manage urge to use social media to combat its negative consequences. It was hypothesized that nature exposure through Instagram posts in Study 1 and nature park in Study 2 reduces urge to use social media. The underlying mechanisms were tested in a theory-driven serial mediation model, in which positive emotions, attention restoration and self-regulation served as serial mediators. Study 1 employed Instagram experimental manipulation in a laboratory setting by randomly assigning 206 undergraduates to view Instagram accounts …

Essays On Financial Econometrics, Yuexuan Ren

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation consists of two papers that contribute to the theory of estimation, inference, and prediction using high-frequency financial data. In the first chapter, time-varying betas from return regressions, commonly used to measure systematic financial market risk, are studied using high-frequency data. A novel econometric framework is introduced for the nonparametric estimation of these betas. The optimal finite-sample inference, in a well-defined sense, is enabled by the local Gaussian property of a generic continuous-time benchmark model under the fixed-k framework. Furthermore, a uniform functional inference theory for spot regressions is developed. The proposed methodology is broadly applicable in empirical settings, …

Towards Reliable Ml: Data Attribution And Adversarial Robustness, Xiaosen Zheng

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Modern machine learning (ML) models achieve remarkable success, but face critical reliability challenges. This thesis advances two pillars of reliable ML systems: interpretability through data attribution and robustness against adversarial threats.

In the first part, we develop novel data attribution methods to elucidate the data-model relationship. We establish the critical role of memorization in model generalization through token-level influence analysis, extend sample-level attribution to diffusion models with effective approximation techniques, and introduce REGMIX, a group-level approach that predicts data mixture performance using small-scale experiments. These contributions provide practitioners with scalable tools to audit training data impacts across modalities.

The second …

More Than Meets The Eye: Misaligned Expectations In Social Interactions For Individuals With Chronic Illness, Janice Patricia

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Despite the importance of social relationships for well-being, individuals with chronic illness often face barriers that deter them from initiating meaningful connections, such as perceived stigma, fear of rejection, or strained relationships upon a disclosure of their illness. These challenges reveal two key misalignments: overestimated negative (or underestimated positive) expectations of social interactions held by individuals with chronic illness, as well as perceptions held by potential acquaintances. The present study examined how these misalignments hinder social interactions and relationship initiation. Study 1 involved individuals with chronic illness and revealed that participants overestimated the likelihood of awkwardness, disrespect, and rejection, while …

What Makes An Experience Meaningful: A Process/Outcome Approach, Clement Yong Hao Lau

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Scant research has investigated how meaning judgement of an experience are derived; even fewer has examined how these judgements shift over time. To address these gaps, the present research introduced Process/Outcome Meaning Model (POMM)—which proposes that meaning can be derived from two distinct aspects of an experience: its process (i.e., the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that unfold during the experience) and its outcome (i.e., the results or consequences that follow). POMM further suggests that changes in perceived outcomes may lead to corresponding shifts in meaning judgements over time. Across three studies, participants wrote about and reflected on their personal (positive …

Public Health Messaging About Dengue On Facebook In Singapore During The Covid-19 Pandemic: Content Analysis, Shirley S. Ho, Mengxue Ou, Nova Mengxia Huang, Agnes S.F. Chuah, Vanessa S. Ho, Sonny Rosenthal

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Background:Dengue, a mosquito-borne disease, has been a health challenge in Singapore for decades. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Singapore encountered a serious dengue outbreak and deployed various communication strategies to raise public awareness and mitigate dengue transmission.Objective:Drawing on the Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication (CERC) framework, this study examines how dengue-related messages communicated on Facebook (Meta) during the COVID-19 pandemic fall into the CERC themes. This study also seeks to understand how these themes differ between dengue outbreak (eg, 2020) and nonoutbreak years (eg, 2021). In addition, we explore how message themes on dengue changed across different CERC phases …

The Efficacy Of Incorporating Artificial Intelligence (Ai) Chatbots In Brief Gratitude And Self-Affirmation Interventions: Evidence From Two Exploratory Experiments, Jing Wen Hung, Andree Hartanto, Adalia Y.H. Goh, Zoey K.Y. Eun, K. T. A. Sandeeshwara Kasturiratna, Zhi Xuan Lee, Nadyanna M. Majeed

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Numerous studies have demonstrated that positive psychology interventions, including brief interventions, can significantly improve well-being outcomes. These findings are particularly important given that many of these interventions are brief and self-administered, making them both accessible and scalable for large populations. However, the efficacy of positive psychology interventions is often constrained by small effect sizes. In light of advancements in generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), this study explored whether integrating AI chatbots into positive psychology interventions could enhance their efficacy compared to traditional self-administered approaches. Study 1 examined the efficacy of a gratitude intervention delivered through Snapchat's My AI, while Study 2 …

Determinants Of Trading Prices In State-Owned Asset And Equity Transactions: An Empirical Analysis From China, Lixiao Chen

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This thesis examines the determinants of pricing outcomes in state-owned asset transactions using a comprehensive dataset of 3,638 transactions from a major transitional economy. Contrary to conventional expectations, we find that fixed assets consistently receive less favorable pricing compared to equity assets, with significantly lower odds of trading above professional valuation and higher odds of trading below valuation. This pattern persists across multiple specifications and remains robust to propensity score matching approaches that address selection concerns. I further demonstrate that state-owned buyers secure significant advantages in transaction pricing, with dramatically lower odds of paying premiums over valuation or listing prices …

Research On The Structural Antecedents And Contingencies Of Fluid Team Performance, Xiaodong Zhang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In response to rapidly evolving markets and the pursuit of organizational agility, fluid teams—characterized by dynamic membership and flexible structures—have become prevalent as a key organizational form for addressing complex tasks and uncertainty. However, inherent challenges such as frequent member mobility and multiple project participation pose significant management difficulties and performance risks, including project delays and cost overruns, particularly evident in China's fintech sector. While existing research has begun examining fluid teams, systematic investigation into their structural antecedents and performance mechanisms—especially their contingencies across contexts—remains limited.

The study examines structural antecedents and contingencies of fluid team performance through a mixed-methods …

Environmental Influences Of Zero-Sum Thinking And Its Outcome, Edison Sora Tan

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Zero-sum thinking refers to a generalized mentality or a belief that one person’s gain can only come at the expense of another person’s loss. In this research, I argue that people’s zero-sum thinking is, at least in part, influenced by the interacting characteristics of the environment, namely, resource scarcity and population density. This is because resource scarcity highlights people’s resource insecurity, particularly when population density accentuates potential competition for finite resources. Consequently, zero-sum thinking reduces trust and cooperation as people reduce their commitment to potentially risky social investments. Analysis with data from a large-scale field study and ecological data provided …

Threads Of Time: A Lifespan Perspective On Temporal Simulations, Self-Continuity And Meaning In Life, Jonathan Louis Jie Sheng Chia

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This research investigates how temporal simulations—prospection and retrospection — influence meaning in life (MIL) through the mediating role of self-continuity, and whether these relationships vary with age. Across two studies, self-continuity mediated these associations, but the specific pathways appeared to be nuanced. In Study 1, using a correlational design, frequency of prospection and retrospection positively and negatively predicted MIL via self-continuity respectively. These indirect effects, however, became nonsignificant when accounting for personality and dispositional affect, suggesting the effects of temporal simulation frequency to be primarily driven by these individual differences. Study 2 experimentally manipulated temporal simulations. Prospection enhanced MIL through …

Disentangling User Preferences Towards Self-Interpretable Recommender Systems, Nhu Thuat Tran

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Understanding user preferences remains a central challenge in recommender systems due to their inherently complex, unstructured, and multi-faceted nature, exacerbated by the sparsity of user interaction data. Traditional approaches often compress user interests into a single latent vector, overlooking the fact that user preferences are typically shaped by multiple underlying factors that differ across individuals. These latent drivers are not directly observable and must be discovered through unsupervised modeling, further complicated by limited historical interactions per user.

This dissertation addresses these challenges by introducing a principled framework for multiinterest modeling, which disentangles user behaviors into multiple latent factors to better …

Tailoring Transformer-Based Deep Learning For Code Generation And Translation, Imam Nur Bani Yusuf

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Software is increasingly pervasive in modern society, making the effective translation of human intent into code essential. Novice programmers often struggle with domain-specific code due to limited background knowledge, while experienced developers face challenges in maintaining evolving largescale codebases. Traditional pattern-based approaches address these issues, but such approaches are task-specific and require significant adaptation for different tasks. Transformer-based models offer a more flexible alternative, as the same architecture can be tailored for diverse programming tasks.

This dissertation investigates how Transformer-based models can be customized for various code generation and translation tasks. First, it introduces Transformer-based approaches that assist end-users with …

Evaluation Of Pre-Trained Vision Language Models In Challenging Contexts, Kankan Zhou

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The rapid advancement and proliferation of pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) have heralded a new era in the realm of artificial intelligence (AI), opening up unprecedented opportunities and challenges alike. This dissertation sets forth on an ambitious and comprehensive journey to critically evaluate the performance and limitations of pre-trained VLMs, particularly in complex and challenging contexts that test the bounds of their capabilities. Our focus is twofold: to rigorously assess the extent of bias embedded in these models, and to meticulously scrutinize their reasoning abilities, highlighting parallels and disparities between machine and human cognition.

We initiate our exploration with a targeted …

Does Moving From One-Story Building To Multi-Building Affect The Health Status Of The Elderly: Evidence From China’S Par Program, Lu Cao

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This study investigates the causal impact of relocating from single-story to multistory buildings on the health outcomes of elderly residents in China. Using China’s Poverty Alleviation Relocation (PAR) program as an exogenous policy shock, we employ instrumental variable and difference-in-differences approaches to establish causality. Our analysis of data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (2011-2018) reveals a nuanced relationship between vertical living and elderly health. While relocation to multi-story buildings is associated with deterioration in self-reported physical health status, it significantly improves mental health conditions and life satisfaction among elderly movers. We identify two key mechanisms driving these …

Essays On Spatial Economics And International Trade, Yunlong Song

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation consists of two chapters that study the China’s spatial economy in the context of heterogenous skill workers, local capital investment, and foreign direct investment (FDI). The first chapter studies how production factor accumulations in space respond to economic shocks or events, and how those responses modify the aggregate and distributional impacts of shocks. To examine their responses and implications, we develop a dynamic spatial model that incorporates capital accumulation and skill acquisition. Focusing on China’s trade liberalization and infrastructure expansion in the early 2000s, we show that allowing for capital accumulation amplifies welfare gains and intensifies between-skill inequality, …

The Impact Of Nafta On Prices And Competition: Evidence From Mexican Manufacturing Plants, Felipe Brugués, Ayumu Ken Kikkawa, Yuan Mei, Pablo Robles

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper assesses the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement on Mexican manufacturing plants’ output prices and markups. We distinguish between Mexican goods that are exported and those sold domestically, and decompose their prices separately into markups and marginal costs. We then analyze how these components were affected by the reductions in Mexican output tariffs, intermediate input tariffs, and U.S. tariffs on Mexican exports. We find that domestically sold products saw a decline in prices as Mexican plants faced more competition and gained access to cheaper inputs. Prices of exported goods fell only slightly as plants increased their …

Educating Indians, Learning ‘Indianness’: Navigating Pluralistic Educational Infrastructures In Diasporic Singapore, Emma Grimley, Orlando Woods, Lily Kong

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This paper advances the idea of ‘educational infrastructures’ to explore the slippages created by national education frameworks and the everyday ways in which citizen-subjects learn to be part of an ethno-cultural community. In doing so, we tease apart the differences between education as a top-down process of citizen-making and learning as a poly-directional assemblage of behaviours and influences that permeate the socio-spatial landscapes of ethnic belonging. We illustrate these theoretical arguments through an analysis of Singapore’s diasporic Indian community and the collapse of linguistically and culturally complex community backgrounds under the Mother Tongue policy. This leads to a pluralisation of …

More Concerns About Atmospheric Methane Removal Efforts, Joshua Luczak

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported record-high global atmospheric carbon dioxide levels (419.3 ppm) in 2023, alongside atmospheric methane levels (1922.6 ppb) now over 160% above pre-industrial levels. The World Meteorological Organization predicts 2024 could surpass 2023 as the warmest year on record, with more frequent and severe extreme weather events. Meeting the Paris Climate goal of limiting global warming to well below 2°C—or ideally 1.5°C—above pre-industrial levels is becoming increasingly difficult. To address these challenges, efforts are expanding beyond reducing greenhouse gas emissions. While carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies have been the focus, attention is now turning to …

Park Cool Island Modifications To Assess Radiative Cooling Of A Tropical Urban Park, Graces N. Y. Ching, Sin Kang Yik, Su Li Heng, Beatrice H. Ho, Peter J. Crank, Moshe Eliezer Mandelmilch, Xiang Tian Ho, Winston T. L. Chow

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Many cities experience urban overheating from climate change and the urban heat island phenomenon. Previous studies demonstrate that parks are a potential nature-based solution to mitigate urban overheating through the ‘Park Cool Island’ (PCI) effect. PCI intensity can be measured through field measurements (FM) or remote sensing. This FM study used a network of meteorological sensors within a park and in its surrounding urban area to ascertain its PCI intensity in Singapore from January to December 2022. Consistently cooler air temperatures were found throughout a 24-h period in the park area, with mean daytime (nighttime) PCI intensity measured ~ 2.21 …

Sensors And Sensibilities: Exploring Interactions For Habitat Comfort With An Environmental-Physiological Sensing Eyewear In The Wild, Sailin Zhong, Patrick Chwalek, Nathan Perry, David Ramsay, Clayton Miller, Denis Lalanne, S. Hamed Alavi, A. Joseph Paradiso

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Buildings increasingly incorporate sensing and actuation techniques to automate the regulation of temperature, lighting, ventilation, and more. This trend seeks to minimize human intervention, justified by the promise of enhancing energy optimization. However, it has been widely acknowledged that loss of control over environmental conditions can lead to a diminished perception of comfort and compromised long-term user awareness and satisfaction. How can we envision building systems that can interact with building inhabitants and engage them at the “right” time and place? In this work, we address this challenge through three key contributions: 1) AirSpecs, a novel smart glasses-based system that …

Relation Prediction In Knowledge Graphs: A Self-Organizing Neural Network Approach, Budhitama Subagdja, Shanthoshigaa D, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Knowledge graphs (KGs) in specialized domains frequently suffer from incomplete information. While current relation prediction methods for KG completion typically rely on neural network-based representation learning, we present KG2ART---a novel self-organizing neural network that employs a fundamentally different approach. Instead of learning distributed representations, KG2ART encodes relation triples of knowledge graphs explicitly and performs parallel inference over the graph structure through bidirectional interactions between bottom-up activations and top-down pattern matching. Our comprehensive evaluation across five diverse KGs (Nations, UMLS, Kinship, CoDEx-M, and a jet engine technical KG) demonstrates that KG2ART consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines (TuckER, ComplEX, RESCAL, ConvE, CompGCN) in …

Guest Editorial: When Multimedia Meets Food: Multimedia Computing For Food Data Analysis And Applications, Weiqing Min, Shuqiang Jiang, Petia Radeva, Vladimir Pavlovic, Chong-Wah Ngo, Kiyoharu Aizawa, Wanqing Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Food is central in our life for its fundamental role in our survival, health, mood and culture. The deployment of various networks (e.g., IoT and mobile networks), devices (e.g., hyperspectral imaging devices, electronic nose/tongue), databases (e.g., nutrition tables and food compositional databases), recipe-sharing websites (e.g., Yummly and Meishijie) and social media (e.g., Twitter and Weibo) has generated unprecedented volumes of multi-modal food data. Such multi-source multi-modal food data provides new perspectives to analyze and understand food consumption via multimedia computing. Riding on the wave of AI, food-oriented multimedia computing integrates AI, multimedia technology and food science to enable a wide …

Intention Is All You Need: Refining Your Code From Your Intention, Qi Guo, Xiaofei Xie, Shangqing Liu, Ming Hu, Xiaohong Li, Lei Bu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Code refinement aims to enhance existing code by addressing issues, refactoring, and optimizing to improve quality and meet specific requirements. As software projects scale in size and complexity, the traditional iterative exchange between reviewers and developers becomes increasingly burdensome. While recent deep learning techniques have been explored to accelerate this process, their performance remains limited, primarily due to challenges in accurately understanding reviewers’ intents. This paper proposes an intention-based code refinement technique that enhances the conventional comment-to-code process by explicitly extracting reviewer intentions from the comments. Our approach consists of two key phases: Intention Extraction and Intention Guided Revision Generation. …