Automation, Digitalisation, and Policy

Automation, Digitalisation, and Policy This event highlights the research and insights of academics from the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences on automation, digitalisation, and policy implications in Singapore. Date & Time: 3:00-5:30 pm, Friday, 2 October, 2026 Venue: FASS AS7 Research Division Seminar Room (6-42)/Zoom Venue Address: NUS AS7 Shaw Foundation Building, 5 Arts Link, 117570a Singapore Research Nexus Policy Outreach Event Directions: To reach the Research Division Seminar Room, go to Level 6 of the AS7 Shaw Foundation Building, turn right after exiting the lift, and follow the corridor past the washrooms. Turn left and the Research Division Seminar Room will be directly ahead. Registration In-person: Eventbrite (this website) Online: Zoom Note: This event is directed at academics and those involved in policymaking. Please fill out all fields to register: 1. Name; Email; 2. Job title; 3. Organisation. If all four fields are not completed during registration, your ticket may be cancelled. Directions: To reach the Research Division Seminar Room, go to Level 6 of the AS7 Shaw Foundation Building, turn right after exiting the lift, and follow the corridor past the washrooms. Turn left and the Research Division Seminar Room will be directly ahead. Download the programme here. Speakers Nina L. POWELL | Associate Professor, NUS Department of Psychology Chao HAN | Associate Professor, NUS Department of Chinese Studies Emily HC Chua | Associate Professor, NUS Department of Sociology and Anthropology Presentation Abstracts and Biographical Statements of Speakers Human Agency in an Automated Society: AI, Care, and Education in Singapore Nina L. POWELLNUS Department of Psychology As AI becomes integrated into education, healthcare, and public life, automation alters what people do and what they need to do for themselves. This talk examines these changes through the lenses of human agency, care, uncertainty, and psychological reductionism. I argue that intelligent systems can reinforce a simplified view of individuals as predictable, measurable, and optimisable. Such representations can limit our understanding of humans as agents who interpret, deliberate, revise, care, and act under uncertainty. In educational and other institutional contexts, this is significant as systems can make these abilities easier to bypass. Therefore, responsible AI necessitates focusing on the forms of human judgment, responsibility, uncertainty, and care that institutions continue to nurture. I propose a human-development approach that assesses digital systems based on how they shape human agency and the skills necessary to exercise it. Dr Nina L. Powell is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Psychology at the National University of Singapore. She also serves as Associate Director of the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Her research lies at the intersection of moral psychology, cognitive and developmental psychology, and the ethics of human–AI interaction. She is particularly interested in how individuals comprehend moral responsibility, agency, and autonomy, how these capabilities develop, and how they are influenced by social relationships, care, and emerging technologies. Her current work further examines the implications of artificial intelligence for human judgment, decision-making, education, and well-being. Large language models and the automated assessment of human language performance: Evidence and risks from bilingual interpreting Chao HAN NUS Department of Chinese Studies Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being investigated as automated evaluators of human language performance in educational assessments, such as writing, speaking, translation, and interpreting. However, their ability to generate a score does not guarantee the validity of that score, nor that it should determine an individual's educational outcome. This presentation examines that distinction through Chinese-English interpreting, which serves as a bilingual and multimodal stress test for LLM-based automatic assessment or generative judgment. Drawing on a research program based on 1,725 interpreted performances in the Interpreting Quality Evaluation Corpus, I investigate how LLM-generated or generative judgments compare with human judgments and how their performance varies across models, language directions, assessment criteria, reference availability, scoring granularity, and prompting strategies. The findings are cautiously optimistic: LLM judges can demonstrate high consistency and show meaningful alignment with human raters; however, their correlations, severity differences, limited discrimination, and uneven generalizability fall short of expectations for moderate/high-stakes scoring. Building upon these results, I introduce a three-layer framework that encompasses system, measurement, and governance risks, along with a multi-tiered implementation model for generative judges, ranging from advisory and supervisory roles to selective autonomy. The main argument is that an LLM's capacity to generate scores is technical; the authority attributed to those scores must remain an evidence-based assessment and governance decision. This has significant implications for multilingual Singapore. Dr Chao Han is an Associate Professor (Dean’s Chair) and Assistant Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the National University of Singapore. Over the years, Dr Han has been deeply engaged in research and practice on quality assessment in multilingual, multimodal, and multiagent translation and interpreting (QAM3T&I), with a specific focus on manual and automatic scoring. His work has been published in leading international journals, including Language Testing, Language Assessment Quarterly, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, Interpreting, Target, and Computer Assisted Language Learning. Dr Han is currently Associate Editor of Language Testing in Asia (Springer Nature) and is involved with the editorial/advisory boards of Language Testing (Sage) and Interpreting (John Benjamins). Fintech and its Futurisms – A Global Condition in Singapore Emily HC CHUANUS Department of Sociology and Anthropology This talk examines Singapore’s emerging blockchain-based fintech sector and the futuristic modes of thought and discourse that are active within it. I contend that “fintech futurisms” differ from the futurisms of other non-fintech startups as they are bets not only on new products and services but also on new forms of money – which depend on new networks and systems of trust. Fintech startups in Singapore are capitalising on a global context of growing uncertainty and confusion concerning the foundations of trust in money. Emphasizing business competition overlooks the chance to engage in more extensive and potentially fruitful discussions about our interwoven economic relationships. Dr Emily HC Chua teaches and conducts research on competing constructions of society, value, money, and truth in an age marked by fast and ubiquitous digital devices. Her current project, Money Island, investigates the novel financial technologies being developed and adopted in Singapore. These range from trading apps to pension platforms to blockchain-based versions of the Singapore dollar, fostering a permanent-beta relationship to money among the island’s residents, where unexpected profits, genuine income losses, and deepfake phishing scams are always on the horizon. The project questions what notions and forms of the good emerge in and through these future-oriented ways of living. Her first book, The Currency of Truth: Newsmaking and the Late-Socialist Imaginaries of China’s Digital Era (2023), is an ethnography of journalism in China that illustrates how online news articles function as a form of currency that industry players use to navigate and manage their relational networks. She also writes on startup entrepreneurship, digital media, and popular political discourse in Singapore and China. Her research has received funding from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the UC Berkeley Institute of East Asian Studies, among others.