Singapore Institute of Technology announces first-of-its-kind Centre for AI

The Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT) has announced its new Centre for AI built in collaboration with NVIDIA. The centre, the first-of-its-kind in the region, aims to bolster AI adoption across industries as well as develop an AI talent pipeline that will contribute to Singapore’s aim of tripling the number of AI practitioners within the next five years.

The facility offers industry partners end-to-end technology support, solutions, and co-supervision by SIT and NVIDIA experts. It will help the industry with the customisation and refinement of foundational and generative AI models, as well as fostering the development of cutting-edge AI applications tailored to meet specific needs.

Professor Susanna Leong, VP (Applied Research), SIT, said, “As AI continues unlocking new capabilities for industries across the world, we look forward to forging ahead in nurturing talent and building the competencies of the next generation for the thriving AI industry. 

"The inauguration of this centre, built in collaboration with NVIDIA, symbolises our dedication to fostering an AI ecosystem of creators and users for businesses and talents to thrive on the global platform to address the evolving landscape of generative AI.”

Dr Ng Aik Beng, Senior Regional Manager of the NVIDIA AI Technology Centre said: “Generative AI is ushering in a new era of economic opportunity. Through our collaboration with SIT, NVIDIA aims to support research and development to help organisations accelerate AI adoption throughout the region.”

The centre is aligned with the Singapore government’s efforts to accelerate AI adoption. “AI can be a force multiplier for the Singapore economy, and the government is working to accelerate AI adoption in sectors and companies that Singapore can be best in class,” said Chan Ih Ming, Executive VP of the Singapore Economic Development Board. 

“By making it easier for businesses to become AI innovators, the SIT Centre for AI in collaboration with NVIDIA can bridge this gap and catalyse the industrialisation of AI in Singapore.”

SIT’s undergraduate and postgraduate students enrolled in infocomm technology programmes and the Industrial Doctorate and Industrial Master programmes have already begun to work on real-world projects powered by relevant NVIDIA AI technologies. Nine students have been involved in AI projects leveraging the new centre since the start of the year. Undergraduate students can also contribute to AI-related hands-on projects through their Integrated Work Study Programme and industry modules such as the Integrative Team Project.

Co-directed by SIT's Associate Professor Daniel Wang and NVIDIA's Dr Ng, the AI Centre has begun interim operations in SIT@NYP Building while its permanent space at SIT Punggol Campus is constructed. The permanent space will measure 244 sq m and includes a demo area as well as a seating area for 50 research engineers and students.

Powered by NVIDIA accelerated computing, the centre will allow industry partners to test-bed AI products. It will further support project collaboration on NVIDIA AI software solutions and access to expert advice from NVIDIA. This includes NVIDIA AI Enterprise software such as NVIDIA NeMo, a platform for developing custom generative AI models from anywhere. NeMo includes tools for training, retrieval-augmented generation, guardrailing and toolkits, data curation tools, and pretrained models, offering enterprises an easy, cost-effective, and fast way to adopt generative AI.

The SIT Centre for AI has also begun research & development (R&D) projects to accelerate industry and government adoption of AI. SIT has embarked on more than 10 industry projects leveraging AI in collaboration with NVIDIA. These range from protein discovery and social science to computer vision, large language models, digital twins and the industrial metaverse. The industry partners involved include SMRT Corporation, which is co-developing a generative AI (gen AI) system with SIT that is aimed at enhancing safety investigations and reporting. By leveraging gen AI, incident reporting process can be automated, expediting the documentation process. 

This technology also acts as an additional layer of checks to enhance the completeness and accuracy of incident reports. It directly benefits ground staff who are involved in incident reporting and investigation, boosting their productivity and operational efficiency. Powered by gen AI, this system will also facilitate in analysing the incidents, raising warnings, and extracting actionable intelligence. The initiative is in support of SMRT’s ongoing commitment to prioritise and elevate safety standards for their workforce and for the millions of commuters they serve daily.

CTMetrix is collaborating with SIT to develop generative AI solutions for creating training data for multiview X-ray scans of faulty electronic printed circuit boards (PCBs). This data trains an image inspection AI to accurately detect defects in soldered connections, overcoming challenges like out-of-focus alignment. Additionally, it facilitates swift adaptation to new PCB designs without requiring full model retraining.

One of the demonstrations at the launch was conducted by SMRT to showcase how they gain deeper insights into commuter sentiments, preferences, and areas of concern by harnessing advanced sentiment analysis algorithms. The near real-time sentiment analysis can help SMRT identify and prioritise areas of improvement based on commuter feedback. It will also support them with proactive issue resolution and further augment the public transport operator’s responsiveness to meet the evolving needs of commuters.

Eugene Teh, Deputy Group Chief Data Officer, SMRT Corporation said: “SMRT is pleased to collaborate with Singapore Institute of Technology and NVIDIA on AI and data-driven initiatives to enhance our operational efficiency and service standards. This milestone is an expansion of our successful collaboration with SIT since our MoU signing in Nov 2022, which has seen the completion of several key projects under the SMRT-SIT Transport Living Lab. 

"We look forward to jointly exploring more innovative solutions that will support SMRT’s efforts to Do Right, Do Good and Do Well as a steward of the public transport network.”

As part of the collaboration, SIT and NVIDIA plan to co-host more webinars and conferences to enhance the awareness of AI amongst students, industry and community.