The National University of Singapore launches the Centre for Computational Social Science and Humanities (CSSH) as a five-year initiative starting March 4, blending humanities with AI and computational methods to tackle national challenges.

CSSH aims to be a hub for interdisciplinary collaboration, bridging humanities and social sciences with computational tools to deepen Singapore’s cultural and social understanding.

A separate Jawi AI project, led by Associate Professor Miguel Escobar Varela with the National Library Board, will transliterate pre-1970s Malay-language newspapers into searchable Malay text to preserve history, with completion expected by August 2026.

A major project titled Computational Social Simulations for Aiding Policy Design brings together 14 principal investigators, eight collaborators and 20 staff from NUS, NTU, SMU and SUTD, funded by MOE's SSRC, to model public responses to heritage conservation and preventive health programmes.

CSSH will supplement surveys and field studies with offline data to include underrepresented groups, such as the elderly, and to validate simulations with real-world data.

The centre funds research analyzing more than a million divorce judgments using large language models to explore motives and macro factors influencing marital dissolution, involving multiple NUS departments and international collaboration with China.

CSSH will host 105 researchers across disciplines to investigate complex social issues—like inequality, addiction, polarisation, health, heritage and culture—using large language models and other AI tools.

The centre envisions extending AI tools to languages including Mandarin and Tamil to build a multilingual heritage archive, and plans an undergraduate programme with MOE funding totaling $556 million over five years to support social science and humanities research.