Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R)

Congratulations to our A*STAR I2R researchers, Dr Nancy Chen and Dr Zhengyuan Liu, and their team of ACIS scholars — Xinyuan Niu (NUS), Zhiliang Chen (NUS), Vernon Toh (NTU), and Yanchao Li (NTU) — on their 2nd place win at the Embodied Agent Interface Challenge held at NeurIPS 2025 in San Diego.

Despite the challenge of long-horizon reasoning, intermediate state tracking, and executable action sequencing, the SingaX team stood out with a novel iterative prompt induction framework. Their training-free and cost-efficient approach learns from past failures, progressively refining task instructions to overcome logical inconsistencies in unseen scenarios.

With an impressive average score of 84.32, ranking 2nd among 48 teams, the team’s work demonstrates a scalable and effective approach to embodied task planning — offering valuable insights into integrating large language models into interactive agent pipelines.

Well done to the team on this outstanding achievement at the global stage!

Our A*STAR I²R scientist, Dr Soumik Mondal joined colleagues from Centre for Advanced Technologies in Online Safety (CATOS) in delivering a team session titled “Deep Truth: Unmasking Digital Deception” at Singapore International Cyber Week 2025. The session brought together more than 90 international professionals, academics, and industry experts.

During the talk, Dr Soumik Mondal demonstrated our latest advancements in detecting AI-generated videos and images using SLEUTH, showcasing live, real-world local examples including scam detection capabilities.

The session concluded with an engaging Q&A, where participants raised thoughtful questions on emerging AI risks, detection accuracy, and adoption in practice. This was followed by productive conversations with attendees who were keen to understand how such technologies can be applied within their own organisations and domains.

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Our researchers at the Centre for Advanced Technologies in Online Safety (CATOS) actively engaged with the community at IMDA's Digital for Life Festival, where they also had the pleasure of welcoming our Guest of Honour, MP Jessica Tan, to their booth.

At the booth, the team demonstrated how challenging it is for the human eye to detect deepfakes and highlighted the need for AI-based tools to accurately identify manipulated content. Over the years, the A*STAR I²R team has developed strong deepfake detection capabilities, culminating in a high-readiness tool called Sleuth.

We are proud to support research that turns advanced AI technologies into practical solutions for the public—empowering individuals to navigate the digital world with greater confidence and awareness.

Thank you to all the visitors who took the time to participate and connect with us.

For more information on Sleuth, visit https://lnkd.in/gBq-EjCc

Discover more of CATOS and their work at https://www.catos.sg/.

We were pleased to be part of CyberSG Innovation Day 2025, contributing to conversations on advancing Singapore’s cybersecurity ecosystem. Some of our event highlights include:

💠 An award presentation to Dr Levente Csikor, Senior Scientist at A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (A*STAR I²R), and Mr Gaurav Keerthi, Chief Executive Officer of StrongKeep on the project, “vCISO: An Agentic Approach to Build a Virtual CISO” under the CyberSG Research & Development Programme Office (CRPO) Translation and Innovation Grant Series 2. The team is developing an Agentic AI Virtual CISO that orchestrates decision-making covering all the functions of cybersecurity, across an entire business.

💠 A panel discussion featuring Dr Chien-Wei (CW) Chia, Ph.D., Chief of Staff and CyberSG R&D Programme Officer, Mr Marcus Tan, Head of Cybersecurity at A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (A*STAR I²R) and Mr Pek Loon Tan, Founder of Antarex where they discussed on how the Propel-X system proposed by CyberSG Research & Development Programme Office (CRPO) maximises the potential of researchers when they engage in R&D projects.

💠 A VIP tour with Mr David Koh, Chief Executive Officer of Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA) where Dr Csikor Levente provided an in-depth overview of the Telecom Cybersecurity Innovation Center (TCIC). TCIC is an initiative dedicated to strengthening the resilience of Singapore’s critical mobile network infrastructure. It features a flexible and extensible attack-emulation platform for cybersecurity evaluation and experimentation, complemented by an advanced AI-driven defence system capable of real-time attack detection, mitigation, and orchestration against high-impact and emerging network threats.

Thank you to the organisers for hosting us, and to all visitors who stopped by our booth and engaged with our panel discussion. It was a meaningful and energising day for the cybersecurity community.

&D

Introducing the new MERaLiON-SER-v1, our first state-of-the-art multilingual Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) model. Designed for Southeast Asia, it goes beyond just understanding what is said to capture how it is said.

With the MERaLiON-SER-v1 model, users can experience:

💠 Dual Emotion Insights: Uniquely predicts 7 categorical emotions (Neutral, Happy, Sad, Angry, Surprised, Fearful, Disgusted) and 3 dimensional values (Valence, Arousal, Dominance) for a richer and more nuanced understanding of human affect.

💠 Tailored features for Southeast Asia: Explicitly trained to understand the rich diversity of regional languages and accents, including English (Global & Singapore), Chinese, Malay, and Tamil, ensuring culturally aware performance.

💠 Flexibility for Real Applications: Use it as a standalone emotion analytics engine or integrate it into agentic AI systems:
1. Emotion-driven tool calling
2. Empathetic conversational AI
3. Behavioural understanding in customer service, wellness, and voice-based platforms

💠 Robust Performance: In both Singapore and public multilingual benchmarks, MERaLiON-SER-v1 achieves superior and consistent performance across languages, emotion granularity, and segment durations.

Designed for an empathetic, human-centric AI future, MERaLiON-SER-v1 brings emotional intelligence to next-generation voice systems, enabling AI that not only hears speech, but truly understands the speaker.

For more information about MERaLiON, visit www.meralion.ai

▶️ Experience the model live on our interactive demo! https://meralion.org/demo/

▶️ Check out the model card on HuggingFace! https://lnkd.in/gHnUvf3P

-SER

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We were proud to showcase at Singapore Week of Innovation and Technology (SWITCH) 2025!

✨ Our event highlights included:

• A live demo of MERaLiON — trained on four local and other Southeast Asian languages — illustrating how the multimodal AI listens and responds beyond text as it captures both linguistic and paralinguistic cues, offering a glimpse into the human-like intelligence behind its architecture. This features the open-sourcing of MERaLiON-SER-v1 specializing in emotion detection for local languages.

• A panel discussion marking the start of project collaborations with our five consortium members, HTXSG, ST Engineering, NCS Group, Axiom IT Solutions, and Embedded LLM, delving into use case development. The panel included Mr Kian Boon Lim, Chief Data Officer and Deputy Chief AI Officer from HTX, Mr Tan Boon Leong, Vice President of ST Engineering, Mr Sunil Sivadas, Practice Lead for NEXT Gen Tech, NCS, and Mr Lewis Won from A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) sharing diverse insights. The discussion was moderated by Angela Chee and focused on the possibilities of MERaLiON and how companies can collaborate to drive the next wave of AI Innovations.

A big thank-you to all our visitors, panel presenters and partners from Axiom IT Solutions Pte Ltd, Embedded LLM, HTX, NCS Group, ST Engineering, National Research Foundation Singapore Foundation Singapore and Infocomm Media Development Authority of Singapore who joined us at SWITCH 2025 and made the discussions so engaging and insightful. As we continue to advance MERaLiON, we look forward to shaping the next frontier of AI that truly understands and connects with people.

For more information on MERaLiON, check out https://www.meralion.ai

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We were honoured to engage our Guest of Honour, Mr Chan Chun Sing, Coordinating Minister for Public Services and Minister-in-charge of the Public Service, at the Public Service Conference 2025, organised by the PSD Singapore.

As one of eight exhibition booths, our showcase under "AI for Smart Nation Digital Services" featured MERaLiON, a regional multilingual Large Language Model designed to understand Southeast Asia’s diverse languages and contexts. We highlighted the significance of:

• How MERaLiON supports Singapore's vision of building inclusive AI for the public good
• Harnessing digitalisation and AI for better communication among citizens

A big thank you to the organisers for a well-run and inspiring event. We look forward to continued collaboration in advancing AI-driven innovation across Singapore's public service ecosystem.

In relation to the innovations towards Singapore’s public service ecosystem, check out A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R)’s article on how our Structural Health Monitoring system is shaping the industry in partnership with ST Engineering and Willowglen Services - https://www.a-star.edu.sg/i2r/research/research-highlights/safeguarding-the-homes-of-singaporeans-with-the-structural-health-monitoring-(shm)-system

Congratulations to our Robotics and Autonomous Systems team on receiving the IES Prestigious Engineering Achievement Awards 2025 for their innovative work in autonomous robotics.

The IES Prestigious Engineering Achievement Awards under the The Institution of Engineers, Singapore - IES recognizes the outstanding achievements of engineers who demonstrate outstanding engineering skills which have made a significant contribution to the engineering progress and the quality of life in Singapore.

We extend our heartfelt thanks to everyone involved in bringing these innovations from concept to deployment, and we look forward to pushing the boundaries of autonomous robotics to deliver greater societal value.

This achievement was made possible by the following people:
Dr Yau Wei Yun, Dr Albertus Adiwahono, Mr Chen Tai Pang Lawrence, Ms Brina Shong, Mr Yeshas Thadimari, Mr Tan Chong Boon, Mr Yuda C., Mr Men Huang LEE, Dr Nursultan Imanberdiyev, Mr Kam Pheng Ng, Dr Efe Camci, Mr Mohammad Asif Bin Abdul Sahid, Dr Saurab Verma, PhD, Mr Syed Zeeshan Ahmed Mukhtar, Mr Chan Jian Le, Mr Zhang Kun as well as Mr Chan Xinyi, Ms Seah Qiyan, Mr Ka Hing Ong, Mr Chin Zhi Hao, Mr Wen Kai Tee and Ms Rachel Zhao from the HTXSG (Home Team Science & Technology Agency).

We had the privilege of hosting Mr Jeffrey Siow, Acting Minister of Transport and Senior Minister of State for Finance, at A*STAR I²R’s booth Industrial Transformation ASIA-PACIFIC 2025 (ITAP), where we showcased our Automatic Workflow Tracing and Optimisation (AWTO) Platform.

AWTO is a cloud-based software platform that leverages innovative, AI-driven, human-machine interactive continuous learning for aircraft part registration and verification. It enables real-time track and monitoring of part repair status, optimises workflow scheduling, and supports a wide range of additional operational tasks.

Our live demonstrations and immediate identification results showcased the future of manufacturing through AI and cutting-edge engineering. Some of our booth highlights include:

💠 AI Part Identification with Continuous Learning
💠 Automatic and Optimised Workflow Scheduling and Monitoring
💠 Data-driven Repair Job Prediction

We look forward to future engagements with our ITAP2025 visitors.
For more information, visit our website at https://www.a-star.edu.sg/i2r/research/I2RTechs/research/i2r-techs-solutions/AWTO

Together with Cambridge Centre for Advanced Research and Education in Singapore (CARES), A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) has developed a Digital Twin platform that offers a new lens to oversee pharmaceutical manufacturing. The platform helps companies optimize production while preparing for both technical and external challenges by replicating a plant’s processes and combining that with predictive analytics.

Pharmaceutical manufacturers often face operational challenges that can disrupt production and impact process efficiency and product quality, such as equipment performance issues or deviations in process parameters. This digital twin platform is designed to address these challenges through an ontology-driven framework that systematically captures and links process knowledge, equipment data, and operating parameters. Additionally, the digital twin platform enhances foresight and resilience, supports sustainability objectives, and serves as a foundation for the development of next-generation digital factories.

Find out more about the A*STAR I2R Digital Twin platform here: https://www.pharmamanufacturing.com/facilities/facility-design-management/article/55320643/digital-twin-platform-bolsters-resilience-for-pharma-plants

Digital twin platform bolsters resilience for pharma plants An AI-powered platform creates a digital replica of manufacturing sites, helping companies improve efficiency, reduce downtime, and prepare for supply chain disruptions.

Accessing sensitive healthcare datasets often involves complex approval processes and lengthy data transfers — challenges that can slow down critical research.

On Public Sector Day, we introduced "Passport", an A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) (A*STAR I²R) technology that enables secure, seamless, and interoperable data access across organisations for federated analysis.

"Passport" has the following key features and benefits:
🔹 Federated identity management: Simplifies cross-organisation access with a single login, reducing administrative overheads.
🔹 Tamper-proof digital encoding: Uses digitally signed records to ensure integrity, compliance, and non-repudiation.
🔹 Data control and governance: Keeps data within its secure environment while allowing authorised users to perform large-scale analyses safely.

By streamlining approvals and safeguarding data integrity, "Passport" empowers researchers to collaborate more efficiently — advancing healthcare insights while upholding the highest standards of security and governance.

It was our pleasure to host a talk under our Emerging Frontiers Talk Series by Prof Alf Zugenmaler, a highly accomplished professor and researcher at the Hochschule München University of Applied Sciences, specialising in a dual focus on mobile networks and security. Professor Zugenmaler is serving as the Vice Chair for 3GPP Technical Specification Group - Service and System Aspects - Working Group 3 (Security), or TSG SA WG3, the group developing the 6G security standard.

Prof Zugenmaler shared about how the advent of 6G networks promises unprecedented connectivity, intelligence, and integration of the physical and digital worlds, yet introduces a formidable array of security challenges far exceeding those or prior generations. The talk has covered key considerations for building a robust 6G security architecture, emphasising the need for a paradigm shift to address novel threats arising from ubiquitous AI, quantum computing, holographic communications, and advanced attack surfaces. He also highlighted the importance of foundational design with built-in security, zero-trust principles, and cryptographic agility.

We are happy to know that many valuable insights and new ideas were exchanged during this session. Be sure to keep an eye out for our upcoming talks under our Emerging Frontiers Talk Series.