Meet Our Chapter Chairs (Part 2)

Meet Our Chapter Chairs (Part 2): AI & High Performance Computing, Cloud & Data and Smart Nation

Continuing from Part 1, we interview the chairperson of another three SGTech Chapters, namely Mr Richard Koh (Chair, AI & High Performance Computing Chapter), Mr Gunasekharan Chellappan (Chair, Cloud & Data Chapter) and Mr Lau Shih Hor (Chair, Smart Nation Chapter).

Please tell us about yourself.

Richard Koh: I'm the Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft Singapore. This is my final year as the chapter chair. Three years ago, we started with an AI pro-tem committee. We’ve since pulled in many industry players and engaged stakeholders across the government and the private sector. The diversity of talent and skillsets and knowledge gained shows the potential we have, not just as a nation, but also in the AI space.

Gunasekharan Chellappan: I’ve been in the IT industry for the last 25 years and spent most of my career in global and APAC sales for software companies.

About three years ago, I returned to a Singapore role. I wanted to spend more time working with Singapore companies and share my global experience. I spent most of my career focused on Data & AI, implementing on different iterations of the Cloud in Oracle, JDA, IBM and Red Hat, so taking on my role in the Cloud & Data chapter makes a lot of sense to me.

Lau Shih Hor: One thing that is clear to everyone is that a smart nation cannot be built by a single organisation, no matter how large. A smart nation is successful when there is a collective and collaborative effort between government, tech industry and private sector.

In Singapore, we’ve always needed a platform for companies to come together to grow the ecosystem. So in 2018, a group of us in SGTech decided to band together, and the Smart Nation Chapter was launched.

What challenges does the Chapter want to shine the light on, to rally stakeholders to tackle?

Richard Koh: While AI’s progress has been very fast, at the C-suite level, I don’t think we have fully understood the implications of AI from an ethical and moral perspective. In my job, I’ve had queries from companies asking if they can use AI to replace human labour and several other scenarios that I would term them as “sensitive use cases” with perhaps insufficient consideration on the reliability and safety or accountability concerns of AI, and the unintended consequences that might surface. In all cases, if AI is only considered solely for cost and time savings, then we are not doing it right, and not truly looking at how to use AI to amplify our human ingenuity.

There are still gaps in the way people think about AI. In my final year as chair, I will be strongly advocating for this area in our programmes.

Gunasekharan Chellappan: I want the Cloud and Data Chapter to represent SGTech members and the community at large, not just members but the whole industry. This could include a bank moving into the Cloud or any other organisation where tech is becoming core.

One of the reasons why some initiatives don't take off is the lack of support and guidance. Take, for example, the SME GoCloud programme. It is difficult for an SME to talk to IBM or AWS about going to the Cloud. Wanting to get there is very different from getting there. We needed someone to handhold the SME. In the new iteration of our GoCloud programme, we involve local partners to help SMEs embrace the Cloud.

Faced with the multitude of available government funding and programmes to support businesses to migrate to Cloud, our members grapple with finding something in line with what they and their customers want. We want to channel the industry's feedback to the agencies to tune the programmes to deliver the intended objectives.

Lau Shih Hor: We're seeing that the government is doing a lot more on Smart Nation. We're formalising a committee that will engage with GovTech and the Smart Nation & Digital Government Office, to let both agencies know that we want to work together and have exciting technologies to offer. We want these discussions to be more proactive than ad hoc.

Secondly, we also want to engage with the larger industry outside of tech, such as real estate owners or operators like JTC, CapitaLand or Keppel Land. We want to be able to provide tech solutions for these organisations.

The government and real estate companies have in the past put up concepts that were sometimes not realistic. Although it was technically possible to have solutions to enable those concepts, they were too costly to be justifiable. The entire process took up a lot of time for all parties involved, and worse still when there was no outcome. From an ecosystem point of view, it will be much better to engage in discussions on feasibility earlier in the design process.

An example of the larger-scale sectorial engagement that the Chapter pursued was the IMDA Smart Estates Innovation Challenge in 2019. More recently, NEA launched an initiative for the environmental services sector in pest control, office cleaning, or air con maintenance. We're now rallying solution providers to pitch our solutions to this sector.

What are your goals for the Chapter in this coming year?

Richard Koh: We have three focus areas:

Firstly, we want our members to leverage opportunities available develop capabilities around Responsible AI. To do this, we will partner with AI Singapore. However, we must not be too focused on the operational aspects of the partnership. We must find the people within each organisation who can be trained and made aware that they are making well-balanced decisions when considering intelligent technologies, and focus on what technologies should do and not just what technologies can do.

Secondly, we must educate the industry to understand the benefits and the workforce capabilities required when adopting AI. When it comes to reskilling our workforce, we often look at just acquiring hard skills. The soft skills in areas like philosophy, sociology, psychology, ethics etc. are missing. We need each organisation's engineering talent to understand AI correctly and have not only the cognitive and emotional intelligence, but also the moral intelligence and resolve to make the right decisions and calls.

Our third focus is the talent pipeline itself. We want to demystify and make AI as approachable as possible. To do AI properly, it is essential to debate issues around privacy and security, transparency, accountability, inclusiveness, reliability and safety, and fairness. We want to have robust discussions across the industry and with government stakeholders, and not dismiss them as just an intellectual discussion and sincerely regard them as principles that have serious unintended downstream consequences if they are not robustly debated and thought through.

Gunasekharan Chellappan: Our first goal is to help our members adopt cloud technologies. We want to help them not just move their technology or solutions to the cloud but help them build their business for the cloud with a cloud-based business model.

The second goal is to work with various organisations such as Industry Associations to help their members to adopt cloud and data technologies so that we can help our members educate their potential customers on cloud technologies.

Our third goal is to increase the dialogue with the government. We're planning to work with IMDA to ensure that both our interests and objectives are aligned. We're already speaking to them at a high level and have agreed on the main thrust around growing cloud awareness to help build a bridge between industry and government - namely IMDA, ESG and GovTech.

We can take these issues on behalf of members, and SGTech can be a conduit that works proactively with government agencies.

Lau Shih Hor: Many problem statement owners worry that while we have the technologies, the solutions from SMEs and startups may not scale. By teaming together, SGTech members can address their concerns by offering more scalability in our solutions. For example, larger players in our Chapter can harness the creativity of the more nimble, innovative and smaller companies, thus combining the strengths of both parties.

Secondly, we shouldn’t allow the pandemic to stymie our internationalisation. Our internationalisation efforts can continue in 2021, but done virtually, such as webinars. I've spoken at many of these webinars. Our members can continue to use these virtual platforms to pitch themselves and showcase SGTech and Singapore’s success.

Join us!

We hope that this has given you a glimpse of the goals and focus areas for these chapters. Read our previous feature, where we interviewed the chairperson for SGTech’s Cyber Security, Digital Transformation and Singapore Enterprise Chapters.

If you wish to find out more about any of our Chapters, or to join any SGTech Chapter or Committee, contact us at membership@sgtech.org.sg.