One of the great things about a sabbatical is that one has the time and space to explore new academic topics and communities. When I arrived in Singapore four ago, my host Ye Wang invited me to get a talk at the 2017 International Conference on Orange Technologies (ICOT 2017). I’m always happy to talk about my work but I had never heard the of the term “Orange Technology” prior to his invitation.
The best definition I could find online is from ICOT 2013:
Orange technology is a newly emerged interdisciplinary research area for integration and innovation of health, happiness, and care technologies. The research scope includes computer science, electrical engineering, biomedical engineering, psychological/physiological science, cognitive science, social science, and dechnology (design + technology). The representative color of orange technology originates from a harmonic fusion of red (representing brightness of health and happiness) and yellow (representing warming care). Instead of emphasizing the relations between environments and humans, as proposed by green technology, the objective of orange technology is to bring more health, happiness, warming care, and more mental wellness to society.
My own research focuses on developing novel music technologies to help improve the quality of life for individuals and communities. For example, the motivation behind my MegsRadio.fm project is to get people excited about their local music community since I believe that going to live music shows is good for the soul.
For my invited talk at ICOT 2017, I am presenting some of our initial work on “Using Music Technology to Motivate Foreign Language Learning.” This is joint work with Ye Wang as well as three of his graduate students (Dania Murad, Chitra Gupta, Michael Mustaine) in the Sound and Music Computing Lab at the National University of Singapore. My talk focus on two proposed apps: SLIONS Karaoke and SLIONS Radio.
SLIONS Karaoke explores how singing in a foreign language can be both more enjoyable and beneficial in term of language learning outcomes (vocabulary, pronunciation, understanding.) SLIONS Radio app is focused on cross-language music recommendation in the context of a personalized radio experience. We are actively developing the Karaoke app and hope to start user testing in the coming months.