Human behaviour centre up soon: A*star-SMU

HR departments, brace yourselves.

The Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) and the Singapore Management University (SMU) has collaborated to establish a new centre focused on using technology for people-centric issues and human behaviour.

The Centre for Technology and Social-Behavioural Insights (CTSBI) will conduct studies and develop technologies to better understand human relationships, including customer-business and employer-employee relations.

Study findings and technology innovations are expected to accurately pinpoint consumer preferences, identify good marketing strategies, and facilitate urban planning, among others.

Here’s more from the announcement:

Dr Victor Tong, who is Director of the Social & Cognitive Computing Department at A*STAR’s IHPC, said, “In today’s connected world, everyone can express views and offer information about events in real time and at a rapid pace. This creates a large volume of dynamic data that is potentially very useful, but it is often difficult to figure out the critical ideas embedded in the data. One of the goals of our collaboration is to develop better ways to extract meaning and value from the large amounts of data collected from social software such as internet forums and blogs, and their related technologies. This can be effectively accomplished by bringing together the relevant top expertise in both social computing and behavioural sciences.”

Professor David Chan, Lee Kuan Yew Fellow and Professor of Psychology and Director of SMU’s BSI, said, “There has been increasing interest in academia, government and businesses to use big data and behavioural sciences to address important economic and social issues. Our approach in this new centre will combine the data-driven sense-making methods in social technologies with the hypothesis-driven approaches in behavioural sciences. To do this, we will integrate the diverse but complementary expertise from the institutes in A*STAR, SMU and other existing resources in Singapore. The research findings from this integrative approach will generate people-centric solutions that can better address critical issues in Singapore and elsewhere.”