Two Faculty in CCDS Receive Google Safeworks Sponsored Research Agreements

Two faculty in NTU’s College of Computing and Data Science have received sponsored research agreements with Google, as part of the Google Safeworks 2026 Research Program. Both agreements are for one year.

Endowed Yidan Professor in Artificial Intelligence Yew-Soon Ong will receive US$100,000 toward research projects in evolving AI safety policies for privacy, security, and user-centric trust. Ong plans to addresses three complementary challenges: identifying vulnerabilities that transfer across vision-language tasks through computational modelling; strengthening the foundations for evaluating the trustworthiness and robustness of AI systems; and investigating cultural alignment benchmarks and methods to support more culturally aware and context-sensitive reasoning in large language models.

The goals of Ong’s research include reproducible robustness evaluations and controlled, privacy-aware updates to safety responses, such as refusals, warnings and explanations, while preserving core safety constraints.

“Receiving this funding will accelerate our research into adaptive AI safety mechanisms that evolve alongside increasingly capable AI systems,” Ong said. “With a particular focus on the Asia-Pacific region, where rich cultural, linguistic, and societal diversity presents unique challenges, we aim to develop culturally aware safeguards that respect diverse human values while upholding universal principles of safety, security, and trust.”

Associate Professor Anupam Chattopadhyay will receive US$80,000 towards research in next-generation, full-stack AI infrastructure security. Chattopadhyay plans to use the funding to continue his work on developing faster and more reliable methods for deepfake detection, networks that are robust against attacks by quantum computers, and cryptography-based techniques to embed safety protocols in an AI.

This is a continuation of Chattopadhyay’s work on AI security and quantum-safe security problems, which has been supported by research centres such as NTU SCRIPTS and Temasek Labs@NTU.

“Safety and privacy is one of the most important domains of current digital technology across the world,” Chattopadhyay said. “We are excited to work together with Google to make the digital world a safer place.”

 “In line with NTU’s mission to drive global impact, this agreement will support our faculty in researching AI security and safety, which are some of the most important problems that the world faces today,” said Associate Dean for Research Lin Weisi. “We look forward to more future collaborations with Google.”