Singapore Talks Data Sharing to Unlock AI Innovations
Singapore needs to create an environment for the sharing of diverse, high-quality data across industries, says Singapore Minister Josephine Teo.
Minister Teo, who helms Communications and Information, spoke at the World AI Cannes Festival held in the French city of Cannes last week.
Frameworks and platforms for data sharing
“We need to create an environment that allows stakeholders across different sectors to share and create richer datasets. This will help us unlock more innovative AI applications,” she said at a keynote session on the first day.
On that front, Singapore is investing in frameworks and platforms to help different parties securely exchange data while ensuring data privacy. Minister Teo says Singapore is currently working with international partners to facilitate data flow across borders to empower AI innovations.
She suggested that the machine learning technique of federated learning can overcome regulatory and sovereignty concerns by training an algorithm across multiple decentralized edge devices or servers containing local data samples.
On this front, AI Singapore, the national AI research and development program, has developed an open-source platform for federating learning called Synergos, she said.
The importance of quality data was also mooted: “It is equally, if not more important to gather good quality data from diverse sources. A smaller, but richer data set can often produce better AI models than a larger, narrower one.”
Going big with AI
Singapore is seeking to entrench itself as a leader in AI research and innovation, and late last year announced that it will set aside an additional USD133 million (SGD180 million) for AI research. This comes on top of an initial USD370 million (SGD500 million) that was previously committed.
At that time, Singapore Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat pointed to the comparatively smaller data sets and emphasized the need to rely on high-quality datasets to offset this difference.
He said at that time: “As a small country, our datasets are also small. [So] we need to better train our machines to learn from small but high-quality datasets. Our investment in AI R&D is not large relative to global investments in this field. But by focusing on where we can make the greatest impact, we can make every effort count.”
According to the latest Asia Pacific AI Readiness Index by Salesforce, Singapore is top for AI readiness, and leads all three indices of AI readiness with an overall score of 65.7, followed by Japan (60.0) and Hong Kong (59.3).
Image credit: iStockphoto/orpheus26
