Recap of FRS Symposium 2025

On 23 April 2025, the Future Resilient Systems (FRS) programme hosted the 2025 Future Resilient Systems Symposium at the CREATE Tower in Singapore. This capstone event brought together a vibrant community of experts and stakeholders to celebrate FRS’ achievements in advancing resilience in systems research.

It provided a platform to reflect on how far the field has come, while looking ahead to the challenges and opportunities of tomorrow. Attendees included key stakeholders in resilience, researchers, policymakers, and industry leaders from around the world, all eager to discuss how to build more resilient cities and future infrastructure.

The atmosphere was also uplifting, marking a milestone moment: the culmination of 10 years of collaborative research efforts, and a hopeful look ahead to safer, smarter urban futures.

Highlights of the Symposium

The 2025 FRS Symposium kicked off with an opening address by H.E. Frank Gruetter (Swiss Ambassador to Singapore and Brunei Darussalam), a keynote by guest of honour Prof Lily Kong (President of Singapore Management University), and a speech by special guest Mr Hugh Lim (Executive Director of the Centre for Liveable Cities).

Dr Jonas Joerin (FRS Programme Director) reflected on a decade of resilience research, retracing the cumulation of milestones that established the Future Resilient Systems as a lighthouse programme and what the road ahead looks like for resilience thinking and scientific research.

Throughout the day, leading voices and thought leaders from industry, research and policy delivered insightful keynotes and led thought-provoking discussions. In conjunction with its close partners, FRS researchers presented findings that spanned technological, social, and policy dimensions of resilience.

Session 1 – Cyber-Physical Systems Resilience

The session featured three expert speakers: Mr Koh Ming Sue (Changi Airport Group), Prof Tang Loon Ching (NUS) and Prof Eleni Chatzi (ETH Zurich), offering a multifaceted view of resilience in complex systems. They shared perspectives from both design and operational angles, supported by advanced models and real-world applications.

Mr Koh shared strategic considerations in ensuring continuity and adaptability at one of the world’s busiest aviation hubs, while Prof Tang discussed how resilience can be systematically defined and measured, underscoring the need to integrate resilience into the foundation of system design. Prof Chatzi introduced cutting-edge technologies (including mobile sensing, physics-informed AI, and digital twins) as powerful, transformative tools to monitor, predict, and enhance system resilience.

In the panel discussion, the speakers examined both the potential and pitfalls of leveraging AI, highlighting the need to bridge the gap between theory and practice to achieve sustainable, real-world impact.

Session 2 – Sensemaking for Resilience

This session started with Prof Martin Raubal (ETH Zurich) who shared about the topic of data-driven sensemaking for resilience. Presenting different cases ranging from analysing congestion in transportation systems to strengthening the cognitive resilience of officers in control room settings, he highlighted the power of data and how it can support the ability to make sense of situations.

Moving to the detection of hazards and sensing emotions of individuals, Prof Kezhi Mao (NTU) shared about the ability of large language models to contribute to sensemaking efforts using social media data.

Completing this sharing, Prof Renate Schubert (ETH Zurich) stressed the need to augment urban resilience efforts with social resilience. Using social archetypes helps to better understand the social fabric and how sub-groups of our societies anticipate and respond to disruptive events.

In the panel session, the speakers highlighted the opportunities to analyse data to detect and manage disruptions but also emphasised that mixed-method approaches are needed to understand social behaviour.

Session 3 – Urban Resilience

Opening this session was Mr Tony Chan (ARUP Singapore) who shared about the topic of climate resilience from an industry lens, highlighting practical tools and strategies utilised in several case studies.

Shifting to a systems-level view, Prof Bozidar Stojadinovic (ETH Zurich) and Prof Edmond Lo (NTU) elaborated on specific methodologies introduced to address resilience challenges in high-density system-of-systems. This includes the ResQ-IOS framework, a decision-support tool for post-disruption infrastructure recovery.

Completing this holistic sharing was Prof Yuan Chao (NUS) who outlined the type of climate challenges faced by Singapore such rising temperatures, the Urban Heat Island effect, and the role of people in mitigating the effects of climate change. He also presented the Microclimate Digital Platform, a tool developed to help urban planners to visualise, model, and analyse urban climate scenarios at neighbourhood scale.

The session concluded with a panel discussion which drew questions from the engaged audience. A final discussion on the role of AI in the field of urban resilience reaffirmed its value as a decision-support tools, but not a replacement for human judgement.

Session 4 – Resilience in Policy-Making

In the penultimate session, Prof Danny Quah (LKYSPP) delivered an impassioned and compelling address on the importance of embedding resilience into governance. Drawing on recent disruptive events, notably the imposition of tariffs by the current US administration, he highlighted the destructive forces of self-imposed shocks and the need for cooperation, trust and free markets which lead to a win-win for all. Despite the possibility of inadvertent cooperation, Prof Quah’s remarks concluded with a note of cautious optimism that through strategic alignment and shared incentives, solutions can be found to enable effective policy-making that supports the building of resilience.

Session 5 – Perspectives and Reflections on Resilience Research

Spotlighting emerging voices in the resilience research community, the symposium provided the next generation of researchers an important platform to showcase their researchers. Early-career researchers sharing their experiences working across disciplines, institutions, agencies and industries and agencies to develop relevant research for Singapore and Switzerland.

Their reflections set the stage for a panel discussion, helmed by Prof Hans Heinimann (ETH Zurich), Prof Wolfgang Kroeger (ETH Zurich), and Prof Pao Chuen Lui (Temasek Defence Systems Institute). The panellists explored how resilience thinking must continue to evolve to meet emerging challenges. Discussions centred on the need to build capacity for future unknown and unexpected threats, and the importance of nurturing interdisciplinary collaborative approaches to drive the next wave of resilience research.

Key Themes and Takeaways

At the heart of the symposium was a shared belief:

Building resilience in a complex, interconnected world demands rigorous research, cross-disciplinary collaboration and firm commitment to translating insights into action.

More than just a celebration of the programme’s 10-year journey, the symposium was a bold statement of intent and a renewed commitment to: breaking new frontiers, pioneering systems resilience, and driving real-world impact through interdisciplinary collaboration. It provided a platform to reflect on how far the field has come—while looking ahead to the challenges and opportunities of tomorrow.

The engaged dialogue among participants, from Q&A sessions after each talk to informal networking breaks – reinforced a collective commitment to translate these research findings into practice.

One of the themes interwoven across the programme was the pursuit of urban resilience and future-ready cities, bolstered by case studies on how to make metropolitan systems robust, adaptable and prepared for shocks. Researchers showcased innovative solutions for climate resilience in cities, such as leveraging urban greenery and smart design to mitigate extreme heat in dense neighbourhoods, as well as novel pathways to drive decarbonisation in the built environment through interactive digital tools and gamification.

The importance of systems thinking was consistently underscored, recognising that infrastructure, the environment, and social communities are interdependent. This blend of forward-looking research and real-world experience framed much of the day’s discourse and anchored the symposium’s key takeaway: at its core, resilience is a collective endeavour driven by innovation and forged through interdisciplinary collaboration.

Prof Kong shares: “Looking ahead, sustained collaboration across academia, industry, and communities remains essential. As FRS concludes, the moment marks not as an ending, but rather a transition point—a baton passing to ongoing interdisciplinary research and practice, with an opportunity to equally emphasise scientific innovation and the human and social dimensions of resilience.”

Mr Lim also echoed this call from an agency perspective. The FRS Symposium concluded not just with reflections, but with renewed urgency and shared purpose.

The next chapter of resilience research begins now.