In a commentary, SMU Professor and Associate Dean of Research at the School of Information Systems, and Director of the Centre for Applied Smart-Nation Analytics Archan Misra shared his views on what building a Smart Nation entails as well as the several projects that SMU is undertaking via the Centre for Applied Smart-Nation Analytics. The Centre was recently established under the Government’s Translational Research & Development for Application to Smart Nation funding initiative.

One such project involves collaboration with the Health Promotion Board to explore the use of machine learning to foster healthier lifestyles through improved food intake monitoring. Led by Associate Professor of Information Systems Steven Hoi, researchers at SMU Living Analytics Research Centre have built a food image recognition technology, powered by state-of-the-art deep learning techniques, and applied it to a database of nearly 1,000 popular Singapore food items.

The other projects include a collaboration with the Municipal Services Office (MSO) where Professor Misra is piloting a project to investigate the feasibility of engaging residents via mobile crowdsourcing technologies to voluntarily perform location-specific municipal tasks as well as developing applications to pilot such crowdsourcing concepts nationwide. He also shared about the successful deployment of Ta$ker, a smart campus monitoring service at SMU.