NCS launches test bed for smart-city innovations

SINGAPORE — A laboratory to serve as a test bed for smart-city innovations was launched yesterday along with the signing of several agreements between Singtel subsidiary NCS and A*STAR, the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) as well as Cisco, as the technology industry readies itself to drive Singapore’s efforts to become a Smart Nation.

Dubbed SURF@NCS — short for Solutions for Urbanised Future — the lab will offer a space for public agencies and commercial enterprises to create and test smart-city innovations in the areas of education, healthcare, transport and public safety.

Ms Chua Sock Koong, Singtel group chief executive, said NCS had in the past year developed smart-city solutions in such areas. For instance, its Intelligent Command & Control Platform was used in the Safe City Test Bed project in Little India, where riots had occurred in 2013. Through this platform, sensors will acquire live feeds, and data will be analysed and reports generated to alert public agencies should there be threats to public safety.

NCS said 15 partners — including global technology companies and local start-ups — have committed to collaborate on co-creating technologies to help realise the Smart Nation vision.

“Our focus will be on areas that are complementary to the solutions that NCS is building for our customers, such as Internet of Things solutions, software platforms and sensor networks for smart-city management,” said Ms Chua.

“With SURF@NCS, we will also have a living lab, where NCS and our partners can come together to co-create, test, refine and validate new applications and technologies.”

The 15 partners include big names such as Microsoft and Samsung, as well as home-care remote monitoring solutions company WEB Biotechnology and Temasek Polytechnic. Other partners are in the field of tele-health, pharmacy automation and robotics.

Ms Chua pointed out that the need for talent was urgent. To that end, NCS will recruit up to 120 professionals, primarily enterprise architects, product engineers and data scientists.

Among the deals announced yesterday, NCS signed an agreement with A*STAR’s Institute for Infocomm Research to build a talent pool with capabilities in emerging technologies, data science and advanced analytics. A programme will be launched to train manpower in these fields.

The other two agreements are with the SUTD and Cisco. With the SUTD, NCS aims to co-develop a Smart Campus, with applications such as remote classroom interaction, eAssessment tools and an integrated campus administration system. The Cisco collaboration will focus on developing solutions in areas such as data virtualisation.