Predicting public opinion, preserving historical texts: New NUS centre marries humanities with AI

A new NUS centre is combining AI with humanities to predict public opinion, preserve historical texts, and tackle complex social issues. Read more at straitstimes.com.

SINGAPORE – An AI-driven platform will soon be created to simulate public responses to local policies, to stress-test and refine ideas before they are rolled out.

Powered by large language models (LLMs) – artificial intelligence systems trained on vast amounts of text to analyse and generate content – the platform will model how parts of society might react to proposals, such as those related to heritage conservation, sustainability and health.

The five-year undertaking is expected to start in July.

Separately, AI tools are being built to transliterate Singapore’s pre-1970s Malay-language newspapers written in Jawi, a script few can now read. Using optical character recognition, the system converts thousands of archived pages into searchable Malay text, preserving a significant part of the nation’s history.

These initiatives are among more than 50 projects under the new Centre for Computational Social Science and Humanities (CSSH) at the National University of Singapore (NUS) that will be officially launched on March 4.

This comes as interdisciplinary research is becoming more important, with increasingly complex challenges facing humanity that require expertise from multiple fields.