AI Singapore (AISG) was launched in June 2017 as an integrated, impact-driven, research and innovation program in artificial intelligence (AI) for the entire country. As a national initiative, AISG brings together the strength of Singaporean research bodies in Singapore's Autonomous Universities (AUs) and research institutes, together with the vibrant ecosystem of AI start-ups and companies developing AI products, to perform use-inspired research, create innovative AI solution, and develop the talent to power Singapore's AI efforts. To achieve Singapore's national mission, AISG's activities are anchored around four key pillars: An organization can propose a problem statement where no commercial-off-the-shelf AI solution exists, but can potentially be solved through AISG's ecosystem of researchers and research IPs within nine to 18 months. AISG will assemble a team of AI researchers and engineers from Singapore's research and development ecosystem to work on an organization's problem statement. Through a collaborative process, a company's existing technical manpower will work alongside a team of AI researchers and engineering assembled by AISG to develop AI solutions while helping the company build up its internal AI capabilities.

Expedia Group has announced a collaboration with AI Singapore (AISG) – an inter-agency unit tasked to catalyse and grow the country's artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities – under its flagship 100 Experiments (100E) programme to develop an AI solution to transform the online search experience for Asian travellers. The first online travel platform to collaborate with AISG for 100E, Expedia Group will provide a team of experienced engineers, data scientists and marketers to work with the AISG's project lead, project managers and AI apprentices to enhance travel search query understanding and improve the accuracy of search query resolution in Asian languages. Today's search engines are efficient in understanding travel search queries and providing query resolutions in English, as English is the dominant language used online by 25 per cent of all Internet users. However, when dealing with travel search queries conducted in Asian languages such as Japanese, Korean, simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese, the performance of the search engines declines significantly and the accuracy of query resolution dips. For a start, the Expedia Group and AI Singapore project team will leverage natural language processing and machine learning to develop an AI-based model to enhance search query understanding and resolution in the Japanese language, before extending the model to other Asian languages to enhance online search efficiency.

SINGAPORE: Singaporeans ranging from secondary students to working adults will get to pick up artificial intelligence (AI) basics for free as part of a programme called AI for Everyone (AI4E) unveiled on Thursday (Aug 30). The programme, which targets 10,000 participants, aims to familiarise them with AI and help them understand how it can be used in their daily lives, said Minister for Communications and Information S Iswaran at an event to commemorate the first-year milestone for AI Singapore (AISG). It will also help dispel fears that AI will replace jobs, according to a separate joint fact sheet by AISG, Info-communications Media Development Authority (IMDA) and the National University of Singapore (NUS). Materials for the three-hour workshop will be provided by tech giants Intel and Microsoft. These free workshops will start from the end of this month and will run for three years.

SINGAPORE -With Singapore's emergency dispatch phone operators receiving almost 200,000 calls for assistance a year, every minute is vital. In an effort to ease their workload, the Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) and four other Government agencies are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) and have developed a speech recognition system that can transcribe and log each call received in real time - even if it is in Singlish. For now the system is programmed to recognise English and Mandarin with some Hokkien and Malay, though it could be customised to incorporate others. AI Singapore (AISG), a programme under the National Research Foundation, is investing $1.25 million to set up the AI Speech Lab which developed the system. The lab claims to have created the first code-switch - or mixed-lingual - speech recognition engine.