Fulbright in Singapore - New Beginnings

I've arrived safely in Singapore!

My first week here was hectic. I found the heat and humidity unbearable, and I dreaded the thought of going outside. On top of that, the newness of the environment presented many hurdles. I needed a Singaporean phone number for my training employment pass (visa equivalent), but the sim card provider told me that I needed a pass to get a phone number. I didn't have a university id or access card, so I had to knock on the office window to be let in and couldn't join clubs because I didn't have access to the NUS activities management system. There are also 3 sets of doors with keys to enter or exit my apartment, and countless buttons and switches to turn on and off the lights, hot water to shower, water for the washing machine, gas for the stove. Drained by daily life and jet lag, I questioned my decision to come to a foreign country for 10 months. I definitely romanticized the exploration component of moving somewhere new, somewhere I've never been before and somewhere far away from my support network…

I'm doing much better now! I was able to get a prepaid sim card (only valid for 30 days when registered with a passport but can be renewed with a pass). I still haven't received my university id, but a colleague who mostly works remotely lent me his. And the interactions with keys and buttons are now instinctive responses that I barely register. Finally, I can do what I came here for: research!

Marina Bay Sands at night

Gardens by the Bay

Changi Airport waterfall

I am advised by Dr. Clayton Miller at the Building and Urban Data Science (BUDS) Lab at the National University of Singapore, where I am exploring the relationship between the built environment, outdoor thermal comfort, and mobility. I first became interested in outdoor thermal comfort as an undergraduate researcher at the Cornell Environmental Systems Lab, where I spent a lot of time trying to expedite urban-scale thermal comfort simulations and identify streets most prone to heat stress. I was not very successful due to a combination of my lack of expertise, difficulties balancing academic workload with research, and Ithaca being a very cold-stress dominated location which made it hard to validate my simulations. Towards the end of my time at Cornell I was pretty frustrated with research and wasn't sure if I wanted to pursue this topic in grad school, so I thought a Fulbright research grant to Singapore was the perfect time and place to explore heat-stress related research and more broadly who I am or who I want to be. I applied, got accepted, and came to Singapore on September 4.

BUDS Lab has done extensive research with Cozie, an apple-watch app that launches ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) and collects user physiological metrics. The framework has been used to study a wide range of topics such as air quality, personal thermal comfort, and occupant collaborations in flexible workplaces. For me, I am interested in synthesizing the EMA survey data and physiological parameters collected by Cozie with urban design parameters to understand how the built environment impacts thermal comfort. I hope I can uncover intricate details beyond the fact that shade promotes cooling, and some questions I have are: 1) Does the shading source impact thermal perception? For example, does shading from trees make people feel cooler than shading from buildings? 2) Is there a delayed effect on thermal perception (if a person walks in a very sunny location will they continue to feel hot even after re-entering a shaded location) and how long or significant is this delay? 3) Do different people have different thermal preferences and how is this related to their physiological data such as heart rate? There's also significant collaboration between Clayton + BUDS Lab and Dr. Filip Bijecki + Urban Analytics Lab (UAL), and I've been reading about UAL's work on urban sensing and estimating radiation from 360 street images (recent paper on Transmissive Canopy Method). They have validated their results by comparing estimated radiation with measured data, and proposed using the Transmissive Canopy Method for considering pedestrian thermal comfort in route recommendation. I would love to explore the differences and similarities between the model's radiation evaluations and human thermal perceptions.

Clayton recommended that I focus on making sense of existing Cozie datasets instead of trying to launch a new study, which can be time-intensive and reduces available time for analysis, so this week I explored the cool-quiet-city dataset (public on Kaggle). I am trying to understand the participant's thermal responses when they are outdoors (why did someone say they were hot/comfortable/cool?) but I haven’t yet found any significant relationships. This is pretty typical of data analyses related to the built environment as many factors determine a person's perceived comfort (buildings, trees, pavement, car exhaust, but also their mood of the day, heat tolerance, and activity level). The challenge of this type of analysis is in extracting the relevant features and asking the right questions. I've met with Ben Gottkehaskamp and Jean You, who are both using Cozie to research thermal comfort, and they've kindly shared their progress and advice. I think some good next steps include trying to include more rigorous time-related features in my analysis: How was the participant feeling the 5/10/15 mins leading up to and after the survey? Can I analyze the data using different statistical models and compare the results? What are the best performing models? Clayton also made a great point that sometimes it's too difficult to generalize patterns across all participants, but I can try to analyze individual participants and identify cohorts that display similar trends or even individual behavior that is unique. Even if there are no relationships at all, there can be lessons learned about how to deploy future Cozie studies so results are more controlled and comparable. I found his comment about how the process can be meaningful even if the results are "bad" quite assuring.

Wonton noodle shop at Clementi

Wonton noodles from Wen-Kee

Crowded chinatown street

Pagoda in chinatown

MacRitchie Reservoir w/ Synne

monkeys on trails!

Outside of research, I've been trying to make friends. It is more difficult than I expected, as I'm not enrolled in classes and had troubles joining student clubs due to id issues. However, a lovely visiting PhD student from Norway named Synne and I have established a routine of grabbing lunch together, and she has also kindly invited me to hang out with her and her husband from time to time. I am renting a room from a young Singaporean couple with whom I share the apartment with. They have been extremely welcoming and last Saturday invited me to join them for a home-cooked meal. I’m also connecting with fellow Fulbrighters in Singapore, and Jeong-Eun and I had a wonderful discussion about education in the creative domain. I treasure these little moments and I am grateful for all the acts of kindness people have shown me. Of course, I've also been eating my way through the city!

Lastly, some ideas about this blog. I plan to write about my research and other activities during my Fulbright every two weeks, and hopefully this can motivate me to do good work and to document it well. I also found there to be surprisingly little written documentation about how to apply for a Fulbright open research grant and what it entails (as compared to the proliferate blog posts about applying for the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship Program), so it would be great if this can also serve as a resource for people interested in pursuing a Fulbright open research project.

My room during unpacking

My room after unpacking

stitch + durian transit card

Thanks for making it to the end, here are photos of my room transformation and my adorable transit card :)