Teams Up with Business China and ITE to Nurture Local AI Talents

SINGAPORE, 19 July 2021 – SenseTime, a leading global artificial intelligence (AI) company, today launched the SenseTime International AI Innovation Hub (“Hub”) in Singapore to serve as a locus for Southeast Asia to further its AI capabilities. The company also reaffirmed its commitment to nurture Singapore-based AI talents via two Memoranda of Understanding (MoU), one with Business China and the other with Singapore’s Institute of Technical Education (ITE), to support AI capability building in Singapore. The launch of the Hub was officiated by Guest-of-Honour Ms Sun Xueling, Minister of State, Ministry of Education, Singapore, who also witnessed the two MoU signings.

Guest of Honour Ms Sun Xueling, Minister of State, Ministry of Education Singapore, and Mr Martin Huang, Managing Director of SenseTime International, initiating the SenseTime International AI Innovation Hub launch sequence with their right hands. 

With AI projected to have a 10 to 18 percent GDP uplift across Southeast Asia and contribute nearly US$1 trillion to the region’s economy by 2030[1], the Hub in Singapore will showcase the company’s AI and Computer Vision technologies, and serve as an immersive living lab to help businesses harness the power of AI to accelerate Southeast Asia’s digital economy and unlock new opportunities through connected intelligence.

To bolster the AI ecosystem in Singapore through talent cultivation, SenseTime will also be partnering with Business China and ITE to provide AI know-how and hands-on experience to local tertiary students, post-graduates, and adults with an interest in AI to develop their technical capabilities in the field.

“Singapore's status as a global financial hub and its tremendous growth potential to become the centre for AI innovation in Southeast Asia marks it as a strategic locations in SenseTime’s expansion footprint. To this end, we established our Hub in Singapore to pave the way for and highlight our commitment to AI innovation and its adoption by businesses in the region. With our roots in academia, we hope to bring more original innovation and responsible AI technologies to accelerate Southeast Asia’s digital economy,” said Dr Xu Li, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, SenseTime Group. 

“To bolster Singapore’s agenda on cultivating and growing a local talent pool for the digital-first era, the need to enhance AI know-how for future generations is greater than ever. The time is therefore ripe for our collaborations with Business China and ITE on nurturing local AI talent that collectively reaffirm our support for the whole-of-nation talent development effort. They also reflect our continual goal of building upon the foundation of cross-sector partnerships we have forged here to further anchor our roots in the local AI ecosystem,” said Mr Martin Huang, Managing Director, SenseTime International.

Launch of the Hub

The launch of the Hub facilitates businesses in Southeast Asia to experiment more with AI and find practical AI-led products to real-world problems to accelerate digital transformation.

The Hub features eight different zones that showcase real-world AI applications for augmented and mixed reality, education, healthcare and customer engagement scenarioses; visitors are invited to immerse themselves in an environment powered by SenseTime’s industry-leading technologies and envision wide-ranging possibilities enabled through AI.

Highlights of the Hub include:

AI Education

Visitors will witness first-hand SenseTime Edu – SenseTime’s comprehensive AI Education platform – in action, including the web-based module learning platform SenseStudy, and hands-on coding modules with SenseRover Mini and SenseStorm robots. The showcase will enable visitors, in particular educators, to uncover ways to personalise AI learning to cater to their students’ learning styles.

Augmented Reality for Tourism and Culture

An immersive zone featuring SenseTime’s Augmented Reality (AR) platform, SenseMARS, which connects the virtual world with the real world to deliver fresh experiences and interactions to end users.

Visitors may interact with an AR simulation of the Merlion and Marina Bay Sands building and take commemorative photos with the attractions. These AR technologies have also been used to power museum exhibitions and art installations, like the “Smile2Vote” interactive digital screen during Singapore Art Week 2020.

Augmented Reality for Entertainment and Retail

An experiential zone featuring SenseMARS, which supports highly accurate expression and body gesture identification even under extreme lighting for seamless mixed reality interactions.

Visitors are also treated to fresh AR entertainment and retail experiences, including interactive wayfinding and AR advertisements, made possible through SenseMARS’s powerful post-processing rendering engine.

Nurturing Global AI Professionals Together with Business China

To equip a new generation of Singaporean youths and talents with the competencies to navigate the AI landscape in China and beyond, as well as enable Chinese youths and talents to familiarise themselves with the economic and business landscape in Singapore, SenseTime inked an MoU with Business China to jointly provide internship and international exchange opportunities for talents from both countries.

Under the MoU, SenseTime will come on board the Singapore-China Youth Interns Exchange Scheme (YES) to provide tertiary students from Singapore and China with internship opportunities at SenseTime’s China and Singapore offices respectively. Through a series of curated activities, such as training programmes and technology forums held with Chinese technopreneurs and industry players, participants will gain meaningful cross-border experiences first-hand.

SenseTime will also launch a new programme to introduce China’s business landscape to students under the Industrial Post-graduate Programme (IPP), to nurture a pool of talents with a good understanding of China’s economic, business, social, cultural and educational environment.

“While internships can be a stepping stone to a youth’s professional career, they can also help companies build a pipeline of promising young talents. Business China is therefore pleased to work with SenseTime to offer an internship programme at both its offices in Singapore and China. As youths based in Singapore can apply for internships in China and vice versa, this is a valuable opportunity to nurture Singapore-China savvy talents, one of Business China's key strategic objectives, in the fast-growing AI landscape. We believe that this arrangement will play an important role in supporting Singapore’s National AI Strategy, as we cultivate professional AI competencies and the ability to appreciate local cultures and operating environments in Singapore, China and the region, facilitating cross-border collaborations,” said Ms Tin Pei Ling, Chief Executive Officer, Business China.

Cultivating Local AI Talent with ITE

In conjunction with the launch of the Hub, SenseTime furthers its commitment to promoting and facilitating AI education in Singapore through the signing of an MoU with ITE to jointly develop AI competencies for students and staff.

As part of this two-year MoU, SenseTime and ITE aim to equip ITE students, staff and adult learners with AI technical competencies through:

• support in AI competency-building for educators at ITE by providing the SenseStudy AI Education curriculum via its Train-the-Trainer programme;

• the Enhanced Industrial Attachment for ITE students to be placed with SenseTime’s partners to explore and work on AI industry proof-of-concept (POC) projects with coaching and mentorship; and

• Continuing Education and Training (CET) programmes for adult learners in the fields of Computer Vision and Smart City, with certification provided upon completion of the course.  

“This valuable partnership will enable ITE to leverage SenseTime’s know-how in deep learning and computer vision technologies to deepen AI competencies in our students, staff and adult learners. We are excited to advance our AI journey with SenseTime’s support,” said Ms Low Khah Gek, CEO, ITE.

[1] EDBI-Kearney AI Whitepaper