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THE RISE OF THINKING MACHINES The Singapore government certainly believes in the potential of artificial intelligence (AI). Last year, it announced that the National Research Foundation (NRF) would be investing up to $150 million into AI Singapore, a national programme to address challenges that affect both society and industry; to invest in deep capabilities to catch the next wave of scientific innovation; and to grow AI innovation and adoption in companies. Chief Scientist of AI Singapore, Professor Chen Tsuhan, tells us more.
Saying “Aye” to AI The AlumNUS speaks to the clever humans behind Singapore’s foray into the world of artificial intelligence.
HE NEXT TIME YOU ARE CATCHING a live football game on cable TV, remember to say “thank you” to Professor Chen Tsuhan. Long before he became the Deputy President (Research and Technology) of NUS, he worked at research institute AT&T Bell Labs in the US. There, he filed a patent that makes streaming digital video possible. It is just one of the 29 US patents that Prof Chen has to his name. Today, Prof Chen has his sights set on even more important things. On top of his NUS appointment, he is also the Chief Scientist of AI Singapore (AISG), a national programme in artificial intelligence (AI) hosted at NUS. AI is a field of computer science that involves training machines to function in an intelligent manner; that is, to learn and solve problems. When Siri tells you what the weather is like, or when Google automatically translates text from one language to another, AI is involved. And it is not just found in consumer applications. Earlier this year, the Genome Institute of Singapore used AI to identify cancer-associated mutation hotspots from the analysis of genomes of 212 gastric cancer tumours. Standard techniques would have taken 30 years. AI is also being used to detect illegal network intrusions as well as by financial institutions trying to detect fraudulent transactions. There are hopes that AI can be used in fields like medicine, to help doctors to diagnose a problem or propose a treatment plan.
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Big names like Google, Facebook and Apple are investing heavily in AI. In addition, countries such as China also see AI as important to their future and are investing accordingly. “It’s almost crazily competitive in terms of financial resources and talent,” says Prof Chen. And despite the presence of so many heavy-hitters, he believes that Singapore can still play in the big leagues. “Singapore has already done things right. Rather than trying to compete on quantity, we are already very competitive in terms of quality.”
GETTING WITH THE PROGRAMME According to Prof Chen, Singapore leads the world in terms of AI citation impact. This is a measure that looks at the number of citations a paper receives, weighted by field. Machine learning, in particular, is an area where Singapore researchers are doing well, specifically, the sub-field of speech recognition and natural language processing. This is partly because they have to deal with a challenging language environment in Singapore. Here, you have people using multiple languages in the same sentence and even when everyone is speaking the same language, there is a multitude of accents. Add to this the idiosyncrasies of Singlish grammar and you can see why Alexa and Siri would struggle with processing language in Singapore. “We already have researchers, funded by