AI Futures at FASS — Brown Bag Session #1

A/P Kokil Jaidka and Dr Nick Huang

Talk #1: "Telic Errors: Why VLMs Fail as Annotators of Harmful Content" (A/P Kokil Jaidka)
Vision-language models now annotate sensitive content at scale, but standard pipelines measure only whether a model can identify what an image depicts, rarely testing whether it grasps what that content means to the affected community. This is a telic error: a surface-accurate annotation that erases the symbolic significance that makes content consequential. Across six open-weight VLMs and two datasets, we trace this failure to the annotation protocol itself. This gap indicates models possess relevant cultural knowledge, but standard prompts may not elicit them. Our five-type error taxonomy and dual-axis evaluation framework makes this failure measurable, and we argue for redesigning annotation protocols to elicit that knowledge.

Talk #2: "Artificial Intelligence, genuine understanding? A perspective from human language" (Dr Nick Huang)
Large Language Models have achieved impressive performance in many domains. Within linguistics, LLMs have been reported to show human-like "behaviour" and "knowledge": for example, they complete sentences in ways consistent with abstract grammatical rules. These findings invite the conclusion that with language, humans do some version of what LLMs do, with consequences for our understanding of how humans learn and use language. I argue for a more cautious view, drawing in part from general critiques of LLMs and my own work on the grammatical rules of wh-questions.

AI Futures at FASS — Brown Bag Session #2

Dr Morar Florin Stefan and Prof Lorenz Goette

Talk #1: "Learning from a Snowflake: Objectivity, Trained Judgment, and the Promise of AI for Historical Research" (Dr Morar Florin-Stefan)

This talk asks how AI can pose new questions and answer old ones within historical inquiry. Revisiting ideals of objectivity and trained judgment, it examines early results from two computational projects to discuss the role of evidence, interpretation, and expertise. The talk hopes to be a reflection on how historians might use AI critically without sacrificing practices that make history meaningful.

Talk #2: "The Miscalibration of LLM Judgments" (Prof Lorenz Goette)

LLMs are increasingly used to assist in decision making. We show that LLMs suffer from miscalibrated judgments in several domains. With regard to their reasoning, LLMs are overconfident, far more so than their human counterparts. This overconfidence spills over to users. In forecasting tasks, by contrast, LLMs are underconfident and use additional information inefficiently.

Bhoomika Joshi (South Asian Studies)

Attachments to Hurt

This presentation will focus on the key and overarching argument of my book manuscript Attachments to Hurt (work in progress). More often than not, hurt is studied as a constitutive expression of the historically oppressed and marginalized. Based on over a decade of research, the book centres on the contradictions of hurt as a social fact when it becomes constitutive of the politics of the traditionally privileged (caste) elite and its social, economic, political, and cultural life in India. In the landscape of growing concerns about majoritarianism across the world, Attachments to Hurt offers and invites ideas on what it is about the constitution of hurt that makes it available to the reification of whiteness, blasphemy, religious revivalism, and caste dominance.

Jennifer Yip (History)

"Civil-Military Cooperation Stations" in China's Wars, 1937--1949: Reconsidering Wartime Political Conceptions of the Military

I examine “civil-military cooperation stations,” a unit through which Nationalist government army divisions could draw on local resources during China’s war against Japan and the subsequent Civil War. There is virtually no literature on these cooperation stations as mediums of local mobilization. I suggest that these stations are worthy of focused study beyond their material contributions to the Nationalist government's war efforts. Rather, Nationalist leaders envisioned them primarily as vehicles of political work - namely, the molding of civil-military relations. These stations, which emerged in China and then parts of Taiwan, lead us to probe changing conceptions of the role of the armed forces in early twentieth-century Chinese politics. 

Dylan Brady (Geography)

Singapore’s Digital Payments Landscape: Encountering scale within and across territory

Digital payments are fast reworking territory. In Singapore, the national digital payment infrastructures of PayNow borrows elements from both digital payments platforms emerging out of China and the long hegemonic US-origin credit card networks. SGQR encompasses all three, realizing Singaporean space through integration inside a national infrastructure. This talk examines how the resulting landscape is experienced and navigated by everyday residents. It finds that Singapore’s platforms provide frictionless transactions—at a distinctly national scale; and provide a conveniently standardized interface—except for the inexplicable incompatibilities. This talk discusses how centralization and connection can paradoxically create greater heterogeneity, and re-inscribe rather than transcend boundaries of the nation-state.

Benjamin A. Schupmann (Political Science)

Early Intervention against Democratic Backsliding: Rethinking Militant Democracy

Democratic backsliding today rarely takes the form of coups or outright illegality. Instead, it is driven by popularly elected leaders using legal procedures to dismantle democracy from within. This talk introduces a theory of militant democracy that explains how democracies can legitimately defend themselves against this kind of threat. Drawing on constitutional theory and contemporary cases of democratic erosion, it argues that early intervention can be both democratically legitimate and politically necessary. The talk defends the claim that constitutional unamendability and political rights restrictions – mechanisms that at first glance seem undemocratic – are in fact essential safeguards of democratic self-rule. 

Camilo Libedinsky (Psychology)

The Neural Replay Thought Experiment: Exploring the Physical Basis of Phenomenal Consciousness and Intelligence

I will discuss a thought experiment that challenges intuitions about what constitutes an intelligent and sentient being. In the Neural Replay Thought Experiment we record the neural activity (voltage) of all the neurons in your nervous system, and then we replay the activity of all neurons by injecting current into each neuron. Do you still have a mind? Are you still conscious during the replay? I want to assess your intuitions regarding the association between physical and mental processes using this intuitive thought experiment. Link to preprint: https://osf.io/k38pg (Libedinsky, Camilo. "The Neural Replay Thought Experiment: Exploring the Physical Basis of Phenomenal Consciousness and Intelligence." 2025).

Petra Tschakert (Geography)

More-than-climate politics in rurality: Normative pathways for living with loss

Adaptation debates on reparative future and inclusive governance demand grounded engagements with the many ways in which local values and concerns, systemic disadvantage, and lived experiences with climatic hazards are entangled. This entails examining temporalities of loss, grief, and hope while also exploring spaces for deliberative processes and normative pathways toward transformative change. Here, I assess values- and place-based adaptation pathway planning as a relational complement to state-driven climate risk assessments and resilience imperatives. I investigate how residents in Western Australia engage in difficult trade-offs to decide what to save and what to let go against the backdrop of increasing fires, drought, and heat.

Brian Farrell (History)

Special Forces and Defeat in Malaya 1941-42

Why on earth would anyone write yet another book regarding the Second World War British failure to defend Malaya and Singapore? Come and listen and I will tell you.

Zhou Taomo (Chinese Studies)

Re-bordering for Reform: Neoliberal Hong Kong and the Internationalization of Infrastructure in Shenzhen, China

Many academic discussions of economic globalization focus on the reconfiguration of borders in Europe following the fall of the Berlin Wall. This paper, however, shifts the focus to the Pearl River Delta in Southern China, arguing that the re-bordering between Shenzhen and Hong Kong in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a crucial precondition for the expansion of international trade and the emergence of global supply chains. It shows that the increased mobility of capital under neoliberalism transformed Hong Kong into a financial hub in Asia, thus funneling international capital to infrastructure projects in Shenzhen.

Smrithi Prasad (Psychology)

Hormonal Contraceptive Use and Women’s Economic Decision-Making

Hormonal contraceptives have transformed women’s ability to make reproductive choices. Despite their societal advantages, the impact of hormonal contraceptives on economic decision-making remains less understood. In this talk, I will present findings from: a) archival data examining the direct relationship between hormonal contraceptive use and competitive, economic decision-making, and b) experimental research examining the extent to which social, achievement-based stress affects this relationship. Together, this work highlights how and under what circumstances reproductive health choices may be linked with women’s economic decision-making.

Jesse LeFebvre (Japanese Studies)

Appropriating the Biological: Karmic Fecundity and the Buddhist Appropriation of Reproductive Capacity in the Cult of Hasedera

According to Miraculous Accounts of Hasedera, the only thing capable of defying destruction and suffering in the Final Age of the Dharma is a woman. Drawing on my research into the cult of Hasedera, a temple whose cultural augmentation of disaster transformed Japan, this presentation will contextualize the meaning of the Hasedera Kannon’s (Avalokiteśvara) unique iconography as it emerged at the confluences of natural processes, politics, religious belief, and visions of cosmology. In the body of the Hasedera Kannon, lightning strikes and centuries of marriage politics were given shape and worshipped as an expression of flourishing femininity and generative potential.

Carly Nichols (Geography)

Chemical labor: the gendered political ecologies of herbicide adoption in the rainfed rice belt of India
Recently herbicide use has grown in India, largely driven by smallholder farmers in the rainfed rice-belt of eastern India. I present ethnographic data on weedicide adoption in subsistence areas of eastern Madhya Pradesh to argue adoption is cause and symptom of a broader reshuffling of socio-ecological relations. While demographic shifts and social entitlements have (ever-so-slightly) emboldened agricultural labor to demand more dignified wages and treatment, I find the gendered implications are ambiguous. I trace out three ways gendered relations are impacted by weedicide use via knowledge, social differentiation, and solidarity, then envision how weeding labor might be revalued more justly.

Aine Ito (English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies)

Prediction as a helping hand for real-time comprehension in a non-native language
During language comprehension, a listener must decode the meaning of each word and integrate the meaning into the context quickly. Native speakers can do this efficiently, and one way they achieve this efficiency is by predicting upcoming language. In contrast, comprehension in a non-native language tends to be less efficient, and a possible reason is that people tend to predict upcoming language to a lesser extent when comprehending in their non-native language. In this talk, I will present studies exploring the possibility of using prediction as a helping hand for facilitating real-time comprehension in a non-native language.

Masako Hattori (History)

The U.S. Military, Urban Tourism, and Collective Memory in Twentieth Century Japan
In recent years, there has been a surge of historical interest in the complex link between military forces and tourism. In this talk, I will look at Kobe, a city whose economy is now based on trade and tourism but is rarely associated with imperialism or militarism, to shed light on the cultural dynamics that drove the rise of urban tourism in late-twentieth-century Japan, which built on but erased a multifaceted imperial and militarist past.

Steven Pan (Psychology)

Using AI-Generated Practice Questions to Implement Prequestioning
Recent advancements in generative AI offer new opportunities to enhance self-regulated learning. This talk will explore the use of AI-generated practice questions to engage in prequestioning, a learning strategy that can enhance memory and comprehension skills. Additionally, insights will be shared on the effects of varied prompts used to generate AI questions and how human- versus AI-generated questions shape learning outcomes.

Michelle Ho (Communications and New Media)

Digital Intimacies of Gay, Bisexual, and Queer Men (GBQ) in Singapore
This presentation explores the digital intimacies of gay, bisexual, and queer (GBQ) men in Singapore through their use of dating applications. Digital intimacies index the material and/or emotional connections people have with one another embedded within media and technologies. Drawing on preliminary data from interviews with GBQ men, we address the questions: What shapes the digital intimacies of GBQ men in Singapore? How do digital technologies reconfigure their identity formation, interpersonal bonds, and sexual health practices? Our study is timely for contributing to scholarship at the intersections of communication and media studies and LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer) studies.

Elias Garcia-Pelegrin (Psychology)

Uncovering Avian Intelligence: New Insights into Hornbill Cognition
Animal cognition explores the mental processes in animals, including learning, memory, reasoning, and future planning. Historically, intelligence research focused on primates, especially non-human apes, due to their evolutionary closeness to humans. However, intelligence is not exclusive to primates. Birds like parrots and corvids are known for advanced cognitive skills, rivalling those of chimpanzees. In this talk, I will present new empirical data from Mandai Wildlife Reserve, revealing that cognitive complexity in birds may extend beyond parrots and corvids. Specifically, I will introduce findings on hornbills, a previously understudied avian family, which demonstrate remarkable cognitive capabilities. These findings broaden our understanding of avian intelligence and challenge the notion that advanced cognition is confined to a few select species.

Charles Burgess (History)

Man in the Middle in Context: Joseph Alsop and the Politics of American Strategy in China, 1941-1945
America’s wartime experience in China was a complicated one. Tyrannies of geography, logistics, politics, personalities, and culture all combined to produce pathologies that endured after war’s end. This presentation uses the historical approach of the "man in the middle" or the "man on the spot” to focus on a microcosm of that experience: the activities of the journalist Joseph Alsop. Later famous as the a hawkish of “cold warrior”, Alsop first emerged as a political force during his wartime service in China where he used his substantial political connections to influence the politics of American strategy in China.

Martin Mattsson (Economics)

Why Don't Households in Severely Polluted Cities Adopt and Use Air Purifiers?
Air pollution levels are dangerously high in many South Asian cities, often exceeding WHO guidelines by more than ten times. We provide air monitors and air purifiers to households in Dhaka, Bangladesh in a field experiment with more than a thousand households. We show that households underestimate the air pollution inside their homes and rarely use the purifiers even when we compensate them for the electricity consumed by the purifiers. We show that air monitors partially correct the biased beliefs about air pollution and substantially increase purifier usage. Despite this, monitors do not increase willingness to pay for air purifiers among those who have never used one. However, using an air purifier together with a monitor increases households' valuation of the purifier. This indicates that practical experience with purifiers coupled with informed awareness about indoor pollution levels are both crucial in encouraging air purifier adoption.

Canay Ozden-Schilling (Sociology and Anthropology)

This Logistical Life: Port Cities and Capitalism as We Know It
Maritime shipping is key to capitalism as we know it. With its tremendous recent scaling, it has helped usher in a mode of global business where value is overwhelmingly derived from managing supply chains. But maritime shipping is as local as it is global. For it to be the planetary network it is, many laborers in port cities must mediate the diverse sociocultural circumstances of manufacturers, bureaucrats, and seaport administrators worldwide. This talk explores the cultural life of logistics in port cities. It is anchored in Mersin, a port city on the Eastern Mediterranean, host to a Singaporean-administered up-and-coming seaport.

Emanuel Mayer (History)

Quantifying the Roman Money Supply: Towards a Genealogy of Capitalism
Rome’s economy displayed many seemingly modern features: market-oriented agriculture, mass produced consumer goods, apartment living in major cities, and complex financial instruments. Yet, studies of the Roman economy are hampered by a lack of quantitative data. The Roman government collected detailed economic information on its citizens and subjects through the institution of the census – which is why Mary and Joseph were summoned to Bethlehem – but these records are lost. An unsupervised learning model developed at Yale-NUS College, now allows to automate time-consuming numismatic studies for estimating the amount of coinage minted by the Roman government. Strikingly, Roman monetization rates in the first century were comparable to that of France and England in the time of Newton. This finding raises questions about Rome’s role in the genealogy of Western capitalism.

Lau Ting Hui (Sociology and Anthropology)

Decolonial Endurance: Indigenous World Making on the China-Myanmar Border
Like many countries in Asia, China does not recognize the existence of Indigenous people within its borders, insisting instead on the category of ethnic minority. This denial of Indigeneity forecloses discussions about Chinese colonialism and limits transnational solidarity with Indigenous communities elsewhere. Pushing back against state-sponsored discourses, I propose understanding so-called ethnic minority people in China as Indigenous to connect their experiences to broader questions of colonialism and Indigenous dispossession. I focus my analysis on Indigenous Lisu subsistence farmers on the China-Myanmar border and their experiences of Chinese development. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that Lisu experience Chinese development as colonialism. Through storytelling, care, play, and prayer, Lisu practice decolonial world making that enables them to endure colonial erasure by sustaining relationships with the land, refusing assimilation, and proposing alternative futures. This paper contributes to discussions about Indigeneity in Asia and decolonial endurance in Asia and beyond.

Sneha Annavarapu (Sociology And Anthropology)

Aesthetics of Authority: Smart Policing, Unruly Citizens, and the Politics of Visibility in Hyderabad, India
Critical to the popular representation of Indian roads as “chaotic” and disorderly, traffic indiscipline is an abiding Orientalist tragicomic stereotype and a source of culturally intimate local humor. In both official discourse and everyday traffic talk, the “typical Indian driver” that treats rules as mere suggestions figures not just as an administrative and epidemiological issue but a symptom of cultural and moral failure of a postcolonial public. State agencies and NGOs in India have long been attempting to make motorists obey traffic rules and regulations using a variety of punitive, persuasive, and infrastructural strategies. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted over six years in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, this paper explores the logics of state authority in attempting to elicit obedience and compliance from motorists on the road. Twisting existing research on urban policing in India, it examines how and why traffic law-enforcement in Hyderabad is undergoing an “image makeover” and why traffic police are attempting to position themselves not as agents of state violence but as smart, tech-savvy, and friendly service-providers. Instead of writing it off as marketing frivolity or as an insidious cover, this paper contextualizes and locate these moves within the historical context of postcolonial policing as well as the urban branding of Hyderabad.

Ruben Durante (Economics)

Experience, Narratives, and Climate Change Beliefs
Combining information on the timing and location of US-based natural disasters with large-scale electoral survey data, we study how experiencing natural disasters affects climate change attitudes, and how the this effect is mediated by ideology. We find that exposure to the same disaster increases climate change concerns among liberals but decreases them among conservatives, widening the partisan gap by 11-17%. The documented effect fades over time and with distance from the disaster, is stronger for respondents who are a local political minority, and only holds in areas served by local newspapers. Using LLMs to annotate a large corpus of news reports, we also document large differences between liberal and conservative media in the amount and type of coverage of climate change in the aftermath of disasters. Our results are consistent with natural disasters making the debate around climate change and partisan cleavages on this issue more salient, thus further polarizing initial beliefs. They also suggest that, if not appropriately timed, efforts to build broad consensus for climate policies can backfire.

Peter Millican (Philosophy)

Sceptical (and not-so-sceptical) thoughts on the Philosophy and Psychology of Religion
I raise a dilemma for religious belief in a multi-cultural society, but also reflect on the social value of religion, and invite discussion on how the resulting tension might be eased. This draws on my joint paper (with Branden Thornhill-Miller) on "The Common Core/Diversity Dilemma" (available at https://www.millican.org/papers/2015CCDD.pdf).

Nathanael Gratias Sumaktoyo (Political Science)

The Broader Political Significance of Houses of Worship: Theory and Evidence from Indonesian Mosques
Mosques in Indonesia, temples in India, churches in the U.S. Houses of worship are everywhere and serve social and economic functions. But, do they also have political significance? Can they influence the political attitudes and behaviors of the communities in which they are located? Analyzing surveys and mosques data in Indonesia, this talk illuminates the political consequences of houses of worship.

Faizah Binte Zakaria (Malay Studies)

Crisis, Resilience and Morality in Tambora and Krakatoa
How did communities at a volcano’s epicentre perceive the causes and impacts of major eruptions? How was crisis defined and coped with? This seminar attends to these questions by comparing two rare Malay accounts - Syair Kerajaan Bima and Syair Lampung Karam - by eyewitnesses to Tambora and Krakatoa, reflecting on their chaotic aftermath.

Kung Chien Wen (History)

Authoritarian Apologetics: Wu Teh-yao, Cultural Dualism, and the Diasporic Origins of "Asian Values" in Singapore
This talk traces the boundary-crossing career and engages with the writings of former University of Singapore political scientist and Nanyang University vice-chancellor Wu Teh-yao (1916-94) to make the case for Wu as a conservative, pro-establishment legitimizer of "Asian Values" in 1970s-90s' Singapore.

Nicholas Kuipers (Political Science)

Meritocracy Reconsidered: Bureaucratic Selection and Nation-Building in Indonesia
Many countries select civil servants via examinations. In this talk, I argue that the outcomes of these tests prompt attitudinal shifts on the part of winners and losers—particularly when successful applicants disproportionately hail from specific ethnic, racial, or religious groups. Looking at Indonesia, I present evidence in support of this argument from a survey conducted in partnership with the Indonesian civil service agency, in which we solicited survey responses from the universe of applicants for civil service jobs. Matching responses to the database of test scores, I show that individuals who failed the exam are more likely to (1) support preferential treatment for in-groups, (2) reflect negatively on an ethnically inclusive national identity, and (3) believe the recruitment process was corrupt. Building on these empirical results, I conclude by presenting a reconceptualization of the decision to implement civil service reform as a trade-off between the twinned demands of state-building and nation-building.

Sudatta Ray (Geography)

Beyond Lights: The Changing Impact of Rural Electrification in Indian Agriculture
Electricity is deemed essential for development, and yet we remain unclear about the avenues through which electrification impacts household incomes and other economic outcomes. This talk illustrates how specific targets of rural electrification policies have important consequences for household incomes and food security of smallholder farmers in India.

Siddharth George (Economics)
Am I An Impostor? The Impacts of Being Admitted to College Through Affirmative Action
We study how being admitted via affirmative action affects the self-image and academic performance of minority students in China. Several unique features of China's college admissions system allow us to cleanly estimate the impact of getting admitted to a particular college on merit vs by affirmative action. We find that students admitted via affirmative action have worse self-image, perform worse academically, have lower career aspirations. Collectively, our results suggest that affirmative action triggers impostor feelings among minority students, which may hurt their performance in elite environments.

Elliot Prasse-Freeman (Sociology and Anthropology)
Rights Refused: activism, violence, and blunt biopolitics amidst Myanmar’s cursed transition

Steven C. Pan (Psychology)
Applying the Science of Learning to Enhance Educational Practice: Evidence-Based Learning Strategies