voyeurism

Modelling and Optimising evolution of self-organising task specialisation in ant-inspired AI swarms

my students and i are excited and grateful that a paper we co-authored has been accepted at the 2nd International Conference on Metaverse and AI Companions in Education and Society. The conference will be held at the National Central University in Taiwan, from the 19th to the 21st of June.

the paper is titled Modelling and Optimising evolution of self-organising task specialisation in ant-inspired AI swarms.

its abstract reads:

This research endeavours to model and optimise the evolution of self-organising task specialisation in ant-inspired AI swarms, drawing inspiration from the intricate behaviour and evolution observed in ant colonies. The primary motivation stems from the remarkable efficiency and adaptability of Pheidole megacephala (Fabricius) ant colonies in task allocation, particularly the evolution of specialised castes such as soldiers with larger heads for nest defence and smaller workers for food collection. We use an agent-based simulation model, set in a grid-based environment, to simulate ant colonies tasked with collecting and transporting food. Intriguingly, colonies face decisions on energy allocation for ant production, introducing a size mutation rate that influences the percentage of ants produced with larger sizes. Larger ants are not only more energy-intensive to produce but also serve a defensive role against predators. We aim to investigate the impact of such size mutations on the colony's overall efficiency and survival, drawing parallels to Pheidole megacephala ants, where bigger heads aid in nest defence. The simulation provides a platform to study the optimal spread of mutation rates that maximises resource gathering, and through generational analysis, this study attempts to identify adaptive strategies that balance energy allocation, defence mechanisms, and foraging efficiency in ant-inspired AI swarms.

nominated to be part of a team representing the NIE at the Asia-Europe Foundation Classroom Network

i am happy and humbled to share that i have been nominated to be part of a five-member team representing the National Institute of Education and the Association of Southeast Asian Teacher Education Network during this year's 17th Classroom Network of the Asia-Europe Foundation. 

the event will run from May to November, and is themed on 'Learning about AI and learning with AI'.

ASEFClassNet17 Faculty Collaboration aims to enable academics and teacher educators to build capacity around AI in Education. this will be done through the conduct of knowledge and capacity building activities, intercultural dialogues, and the building of partnerships. the collaboration is planned with both online and in-person discussions in mind. it builds on last year's event which had as its focus digital transformation and AI. in addition to the Faculty Collaboration track, there will be a School Collaboration track for teachers and trainee teachers of secondary education cohorts across schools in Asia and Europe.

in total, approximately 300 participants will take part.

recognition on national broadcast television for our stance on the affordances for learning of the Apple Vision Pro

our team is excited and grateful that our early work on the affordances for learning of the paradigm of spatial computing as advanced by the Apple Vision Pro has received recognition through being featured on national broadcast television earlier today.

we give thanks to God, for this blessing.

we are also grateful to all at MediaCorp for the hours invested in bringing the photoshoot to broadcast.

we are especially thrilled that the broadcast takes place during Tim Cook's visit to Singapore!

welcome to Singapore, Tim!

as an added blessing, i crossed the 1000-citation threshold in Google Scholar today.

student projects on AI and mathematics education, and on environmental modelling, at the 14th annual symposium of the Mobiles for Education Alliance

today our team received news that we have been invited to share our students' work on AI and mathematics education, and on environmental modelling, during the 14th annual symposium of the Mobiles for Education Alliance in the track on AI and STEM Education and Other Emerging Technologies.

we thank God for His continued grace and provision.

this year, the symposium is being conducted as an in-person event between the 1st to the 3rd of October, with the overarching theme of STEMtastic adventures!

The mEducation Alliance was formed by USAID in 2010. It is an international collaborative effort between bilateral and multilateral donors, NGOs, foundations, private sector partners, and academic researchers. The collective agenda of the alliance is to: highlight and catalyze promising information and communications technology for education (ICT4E) practices and initiatives, particularly in low-resource and developing country context; to reduce duplicative efforts; to promote collective knowledge-sharing, and to identify and support efforts to evaluate and scale promising ICT4E interventions.

:-)

invitation to be a part of the University of Sydney's Artificial Intelligence, Policy and Education Futures

my associate and i received an invitation to be a part of an event hosted by the University of Sydney, namely Artificial Intelligence, Policy and Education Futures.

participation is by invitation only, and the event will be held on the 4th of July.

The event is designed to bring together diverse stakeholders from various disciplines and sectors, including policymakers from Australian and global institutions, to discuss recent advancements in AI, and the evolving global landscape of AI policy and regulation, spanning regions such as the Asia-Pacific and Europe. Its main objective is to facilitate dialogue across local and global scales, with a focus on collectively envisioning AI education policies that foster ethical and sustainable futures.

we thank God for this blessing.

Deriving insights from historical data of Singapore with computational text analysis: a case example of the Digital Humanities

we are grateful to God that a paper arising from an Undergraduate Research Experience on Campus (URECA) student-project has been accepted to be read at Interdisciplinary Perspectives: Bridging Sociological Studies in the Digital Age, hosted by King’s College London, as well as identified as a Showcase at this year's Research Symposium of the Centre for Information Technology in Education, The University of Hong Kong (CITERS 2024). the former is organised by doctoral candidates of the Department of Digital Humanities at King's, and aims to foster discussions and collaborations across various disciplines, specifically including Natural Language Processing (NLP), Social Sciences, and Social Media and Digital Methods in broader research in Digital Humanities.

the paper is titled Deriving insights from historical data of Singapore with computational text analysis: a case example of the Digital Humanities.

my student Daniel K Handoyo will share his work on the 4th of May in Hong Kong and on the 11th of June in London, and its abstract reads:

This study adopts a hands-on approach to the exploration of digital humanities, applying natural language processing (NLP) techniques to enhance the analysis of Singapore's historical data. The sharing is relevant to the symposium theme in that it speaks towards how domain-specific epistemologies – of history, in the present case - intersect with literacies associated with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Science. In this way, the sharing is relevant to the symposium topic of ‘digital literacy for future readiness’. We focus our inquiry on the recorded speeches and debates of Singapore’s early parliament, offering a window into the legislative priorities that shaped the nation’s policy landscape. In this study, we employ topic modeling – an unsupervised machine learning technique for discovering latent themes in a collection of documents, through the use of BERTopic, a cutting-edge framework that leverages transformer-based language models. This approach enables us to derive meaningful patterns and trends from parliamentary discourse, such as determining correlations between individual Members of Parliament (MPs) and the topics they frequently engaged with. This research illustrates how computational methods can be integrated with traditional historical analysis, underscoring the transformative potential of digital tools in supporting scholarly research within the humanities.

Free-to-play games with in-game monetization: a study on the motivation of gacha gamers

I am very excited to share that a paper based on my student's Final Year Project on Free-to-play games with in-game monetization: a study on the motivation of gacha gamers will be shared at the 16th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies.

this year, the conference will be held in Palma, Spain from the 1st to the 3rd of July.

the abstract reads:

There has been a growing body of work which looks at health and other pro-social outcomes of gaming. Gacha games are considered a free-to-play model of freemium games. Such games provide options for unlocking certain features or speeding up certain processes through in-game monetisation (Evans, 2016). These games involve gacha mechanics, whereby players attempt to receive a random character or equipment through spending a certain amount of in-game virtual currency – acts known as ‘rolling’ or ‘pulling’ (Britt & Britt, 2021, pp.9-10). Relatively few academic studies have been conducted to study the appeal of gacha games and their player base (Woods, 2022b, p.2). Thus, this paper seeks to investigate the different reasons that motivate gacha gamers through the lens of Self-Determination Theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 2000). 1221 participants were recruited between July 2022 and June 2023. Instruments related to SDT - such as the Multiple PSR scale and others - were administered. Results were analysed using t-tests and Pearson coefficients. The results show that gacha gamers develop a parasocial connection with in-game characters as well as form social bonds with others on online platforms. Furthermore, these parasocial relationships and social bonds have a moderately positive correlation with satisfying the need for relatedness. These results help to further support the argument that gacha gamers are not “passive victims of monetisation schemes” (Woods, 2022b, p.11) but are rational gamers (Dong, 2020) who choose how and when they roll. Future research should investigate the effect of excitement on their decisions to play gacha games.

sharing on the Digital Humanities with teachers from E5 cluster schools

our team was very excited today to be afforded the opportunity to share our work in the Digital Humanities with teachers from the East 5 (E5) cluster schools. the invitation was extended to us by the cluster members and the event was hosted by the staff and senior leadership of Broadrick Secondary School. it was such a privilege to share with teachers from History, Social Studies, and Geography during their first networking and sharing session of 2024.