The UNiCEN research areas are strongly linked to SMU’s “Analytics for Business, Consumer & Social Insights,” and “Urban Management & Sustainability” strategic area of excellence, and are very well aligned with SMU SIS' strengths and ongoing activities in the area of Intelligent Systems & Decision Analytics. 

The ongoing work at SMU in the above areas will directly contribute to the research efforts at UNiCEN, for example, the capabilities that have been developed in Living Analytics Research Centre and LiveLabs can be used to accelerate UNiCEN's efforts to develop deep capability and intellectual capital for human-centric urban flow (which include both people and freight flow) and resource management.

UNiCEN will greatly strengthen SMU’s efforts and enable the university to continue building world-class academic and applied capabilities in these areas.