The little red dot’s winning ratio of 75 percent among submissions is the highest across the participating economies this year.
All six organizations representing Singapore and showcasing their technology innovation won recognition at the 2019 regional Asia Pacific ICT Alliance (APICTA) Awards held in Ha Long Bay, Quang Ninh, Vietnam from 19 to 22 November.
Led by SGTech, Team Singapore made submissions across eight categories, winning in three categories and picking up merit awards in another three. The win ratio of 75 percent among the Singapore organizations is the best among the 16 participating economies in this year’s awards.
Hanalytics Pte Ltd clinched the Business Services ICT & Security Solutions award with BioMind, an artificial intelligence application that assists doctors to diagnose medical images and report the analyses automatically. Describing his solution and participation at the awards, Hanalytics CEO Raymond Moh said BioMind was created to overcome the global shortage of doctors and reduce misdiagnosis, and can be used to recommend possible diagnoses and generate reports for doctors to review. “APICTA is an excellent platform to meet distinguished business leaders and promotes further collaborative efforts, which is key to building a synergistic ecosystem. The APICTA journey is also a self-discovery process, for us, picking up new best practices and ideas, to enable continuous improvements for our organization,” Mr Moh said.
Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower won in the Public Sector—Digital Government category for SGWorkPass, a mobile app that enables employers, employees and agents to check the validity of work passes or long-term passes issued by the ministry. Penny Han, Divisional Director (Work Pass Division), Ministry of Manpower, said the ministry issues work passes to about 1.3 million foreign workers in Singapore, while around 200,000 work passes are canceled annually before expiry. “By replacing the static expiry date printed on the cards with a QR code, all stakeholders can now use SGWorkPass (a secure mobile app) to read the QR code and obtain the most accurate work pass status,” she said. “The APICTA competition has enabled us to benchmark our product against our counterparts in the region. My team has benefitted from the sharing and will use best practices gleaned from the experience to help us improve further.”
Also winning in the Industrial – ICT Networks & Communication category was Spark Systems Pte Ltd for SparkFX, a trading platform that resolves current legacy and market issues in foreign exchange trading. Said Ashley Koh, Chief Operating Officer – Strategy and Operations, Spark Systems: “Spark Systems is an FX Trading platform built by traders, in Asia for Asia. We aim to bring regional traders a central low-latency access to fragmented worldwide FX liquidity, that executes faster and smarter with minimal information leakage to control market impact, accompanied by a suite of pre and post trade analytics.”
Among the merit award recipients, Parkway Hospitals Singapore was recognized in the Business Services—Professional Services category for AI Powered Pre-Admission Cost of Hospitalisation Estimation, an AI-powered predictive hospital bill estimation system; City Development in the Industrial—General category for CityNexus, an IOT initiative to transform older office buildings into Smart Digital Buildings; and National University of Singapore High School of Math and Science in the Student—Senior category for ARetail, an app that helps retailers generate 3D models of their furniture products from a single picture and to view them in Augmented Reality (AR).
Awards aimed at bridging the digital divide
APICTA is an alliance of national IT organizations representing their respective economy to build, enhance a network to promote IT, promote technology innovations, capability and adoption and encourage the development of indigenous IT solutions to the global market. Now in its 19th year, the alliance’s awards program aims to increase ICT awareness across communities in the Asia Pacific and assist in bridging the digital divide. This year’s awards received 324 nominations from 16 economies in the region.
Said Shirley Wong, Exco Member of APICTA representing SGTech, and one of the four Singapore judges officiating at the awards: “Singapore is represented across multiple award categories. Our teams came up against the best from 16 participating economies and put up an excellent show this year. We are honored that all our six participating teams have won. It is heartening that our Singapore tech innovations are keeping pace with the best in the region.”
