I have launched the new website for the NUS Ubicomp Lab. Please visit to see more information about our lab’s research goals, projects, team members, news and publications.

I am co-organizing the IUI 2018 Workshop on Explainable Smart Systems with Simone Stumpf and Alison Smith to be held on March 11. The Call for Papers is out and more information on the workshop can be found at the workshop website. If you have thoughts on making AI more understandable, please submit a position paper!

Love tasty food? So do many young adults.
Concerned about your health? So are we.
Difficult to find tasty healthy food? Not anymore!

I am developing TasteHealthy, a mobile app for easy logging and recommendation of tasty and healthy food.

I led a great team to win 2nd Runner-Up for the Open Category out of 100+ teams in the largest hackathon in Singapore – Hackathon@SG 2015 – with 1100 participants during the 25-26 July weekend.

Idea: A one-click health screening mobile web app for at-risk loved ones. Individuals can book appointments for their loved ones to attend screenings (e.g., breast cancer screening)

Awards & Presentations

2015 Hackathon@SG – 2^nd Runner-up

Live Demo (circa May 2016)

I led an amazing team of diverse professionals (HCI, UX Designer, Software Engineer, Data Scientist) to create an award-winning data visualization to celebrate Singapore’s love of food.

Live demo (may be slow on first load).

This interactive 3D Map Visualisation celebrates Singapore’s favourite pastime: eating! It illustrates the diversity of local cuisines in various areas around the country. With this interactive visualisation, you can discover where to find your favourite dishes and the best places to enjoy them together.

This tongue-in-cheek visualisation also calculates how long it will take for you to eat all the yummy hawker food in Singapore! In fact, it estimates a good 160 years to sample everything, based on the reported average frequency of eating at hawker centres. Want to enjoy all of this food more quickly? Learn how though interacting with this visual celebration of SG food!

Food Loves Fellowship is an example of the Narrative Visualization Toolkit research done at the Urban Systems Lab at I²R. As more data is being used and released, many insights can be discovered through the use of sophisticated data analytics driven by machine learning algorithms. However, these insights need to be communicated to decision makers, consumers, and urban citizens through engaging narratives. Our research toolkit will make it easy to use state-of-the-art big data visualizations to tell these stories to engage, edify, enlighten and educate users.

Awards & Presentations

IDA Data-in-the-City Visualization Challenge 2014: 3rd Place

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Home energy management systems (HEMS) can reduce energy consumption while maintaining comfort. However, HEMS suffer from slow adoption and unproven energy savings. As intelligent automation and persuasive design features are increasingly added to HEM products, many research questions remain regarding their efficacy.

We present the FRESH research platform to facilitate
(i) the development of innovative features in HEM applications, and
(ii) their evaluation in field deployments.

FRESH has extensible modules for
(a) sensing to acquire data from wireless hardware sensor nodes and online sources, and actuation to control custom devices and commercial-off-the-shelf appliances,
(b) adaptive and intelligent modeling to test various machine learning and control algorithms,
(c) flexible user interface to explore the design of features based on behavioral research, and
(d) field experimentation with tools for user interaction logging, automatic context-aware surveys and messaging, and data visualization.

We have deployed FRESH in residential apartments and commercial offices used as test beds. We demonstrate the versatility of FRESH with four application use cases: environmental monitoring, non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM), an elevator energy display, and a smart thermostat. We have used FRESH to iterate on sensor nodes, develop and evaluate intelligent algorithms and models, and design mobile and web user interfaces to investigate HEM usability.

Publications & Presentations

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