28 May 10:15 Tei Laine: Taking High Performance Computing to Another Level

Guest lecture on High Performance Computing by Tei Laine, Thu 28.5. at 10:15 in C222

Tei Laine, Ph.D.
Senior Research Engineer
Computational Cognition For Social Systems Institute of High Performance Computing Singapore

Taking High Performance Computing to Another Level

Singapore is a small country; with its population of about 4.8 million (of which about one million are foreigners), and the land area of 710 square kilometers it ranks the world's 114th in the former statistic and 187th in the latter. It is strongly science and technology driven society with a shallow focus in arts and humanities.  Despite the upbeat approach to science and research and the relatively competitive culture, Singaporeans are said to be a rather unimaginative nation.

A couple of years back A*STAR (Agency for Science, Technology, and Research), operating under the Ministry of Trade and Industry, launched a new research program in one of its research institutes to introduce a softer side of computing to the Singaporean research community. The main objective of the new program is to develop competencies in Cognitive Science by designing architectures and models to study the interaction between social and cognitive constructs and processes underlying socially appropriate, coherent, and understandable behavior in agent interactions. The socio-cognitive focus was chosen to distinguish the program from other groups studying human cognition worldwide.

Another goal of the new program is to foster multi-disciplinary research by actively collaborating and interacting with groups in other research institutes under A*STAR. This collaboration will likely have more applied rather than theoretical nature. For instance, Singapore too has a quickly ageing population, so various application domains of socially appropriate automated cognitive systems are readily foreseeable, for instance in social robotics.

In this talk I will first give an overview of the A*STAR organization and the research institute under which the new program, called Computational Cognition for Social Systems, operates. Then I will outline the objectives of this program illustrating the focal research problems with examples.