Dell Technologies, Rolls-Royce & Kryon Discuss AI Strategies in Singapore

Given its infrastructure capacity, education system and investor-friendly laws, Singapore has all the right ingredients to nurture a robust AI ecosystem that could be the cornerstone for the small island’s economic upswing. According to a recent report by Accenture, AI could add up to US$215 billion in gross value across 11 industries in Singapore by 2035.

With the Singapore government’s vehement efforts to foster initiatives in the AI space, the nation was the ideal location to host the 9th edition of the global World AI Show series that had hit the ground running for the second time in Singapore on 24 July, 2019. The show was organised by international business events and consulting firm, Trescon.

“Singapore is one of the top locations for AI and Robotics investments. Our mission was to fuel Singapore’s AI startup ecosystem by bringing in some of the world’s best AI innovators, solution providers, startups and investors to foster business opportunities for the Singapore government as well as regional and international companies”, said Mohammed Saleem, CEO of Trescon.

More than 300 top industry leaders from the AI community came together to share their insights on how AI is transcending as a core enabling technology that can power multiple sectors.

Top speakers for the event included Dr Terence Hung, chief of future intelligence technologies, Rolls-Royce Singapore Pte Ltd; Sutowo Wong, director, analytics & information management division, data analytics group, Ministry of Health; Dragana Beara, portfolio messaging director, Asia Pacific and Japan, Dell Technologies; Prof Nadia Magnenat Thalmann, director (IMI), NTU, Singapore and founder & director, Miralab of University of Geneva, Switzerland; and Guido Jouret, chief digital officer of ABB, among other top speakers.

In her keynote speech, Dragana Beara said, “Most of the AI development right now is done to create collaborative AI to augment us and give us an ability to leverage our humanity. Everything tedious, difficult or that we are not good at, like computing or getting insights from huge data sets is something we are going to outsource to the AI system.”

The show also featured a workshop session from Warren Ledingham from Kryon who took the audience through a technical deep-dive session on ‘how to save 80 per cent of our automation implementation time’, and an almost human-like robot interaction between Nadia Magnenat Thalmann and her female humanoid social robot Nadine, that can remember past conversations.

The global pitch competition for startups in the future-tech space, Startup Grand Slam, was the highlight of the show. Opu Labs, Inc, a digital solutions provider for skin health analysis won the Startup Grand Slam pitch competition and Trsts as runner-up.