Singapore Enterprise Association, Singapore Enterprise Medal of Honour

A New Coffee Barista at Your Service: SG’s 1st Robot Barista

8/31/2019

Marina Bay Sands is an iconic Hotel and Expo & Convention Centre is home to multiple unique and vibrant attractions and a creator experience for tourists and international and local exhibitors in a single destination – Singapore! With wide choices of shopping, food and entrainment options, there is little wonder why the place is constantly packed. MBS’s signature café SweetSpot has unveiled its all-new flagship out at the grand lobby of the iconic ArtScience Museum. The contemporary café makes Marina Bay Sands’ first full-fledged wellness dining concept, as the integrated resort continues to diversify its food and beverage offerings.

SweetSpot is designed with huge glass panels to beam in natural sunlight, guests and visitors can bask in the panoramic scenic waterfront whilst savoring fine dining with premium food and drink selections of your choice.
“SweetSpot at ArtScience Museum is a step forward in our journey to elevate health and wellness dining. We want our visitors to know that eating healthy can also be a fun and flovourful experience. The new café, paired with its scenic location by the waterfront, will be a wonderful complement to our existing line-up of culinary offerings,” said Christine Kaelbel – Shares, Vice President of Food and Beverage, Marina Bay Sands.

Did you know that Sweetspot has the first-ever commercial robotic barista?

Debuting at the flagship SweetSpot is Singapore’s first commercial robotic barista developed by local entrepreneur Keith Tan. The fully automated 6-axis robot has been customized to make different combinations of coffee at four times the rate of any human barista. Upon payment, all to-go beverage orders are personalized before being programmed to the robotic barista. Once ready, guests can pick up their cup at the service counter fitted with digital screens indicating their names.

It was pretty amazing to see how the robot was able to make any kind of customized order with ease and accuracy. From start to end, the robot prepared Cappuccino with Skim Milk seamlessly. The coffee itself was good and tasty too, with full-bodied flavor from the roasted beans and a touch of richness from the milk. You can get your caffeine fix with a handcrafted cup of artisan coffee, carefully brewed using premium blends that are sustainably sourced from certified farmers. For a quick boost of energy on the go, you can savor their nutritious smoothies as well with various spread of healthy food spread.

The robotic coffee barista employs assembly line-style robot to build your coffee orders for you. SweetSpot will be trail blazer making the café a great player in Singapore’s automated eatery scene that will gain traction across the city in the near future as Singapore is becoming a Smart Nation in due time.

The trend might garner pushback for impeding on jobs that could be filled by actual humans yet it feels the likeness of SweetSpot’s Robot Barista. SweetSpot focuses on “human working alongside technology” not replacing them. And though the barista is robot, a living and breathing SweetSpot specialist is always on-site your service, hence will enhance productivity for humans to focus more on personalized attention to guests by offering each visitor an impeccable attention that will make any visitor feel at home.

COMBAT SERIOUS ILLNESS WITH AI: The AMGEN Approach

7/31/2019

Healthcare is undergoing a significant change in Singapore. The catalyst is new technologies; which can gauge probability of illness and attempt to formulate a way to fight diseases. That approach contrasts with standard care, which treats an illness after it occurs instead of trying to fight it beforehand. One thing’s for certain: Predictive care is getting a second look.

New technologies such as artificial intelligence could prove “hugely important to humanity”, says Steve Leonard, Chief Executive of SGInnovate, a government-owned company that funds deep tech startups. He believes that Singapore is poised on the cusp of a healthcare AI revolution; in the near future, intelligent digital tools will help doctors and nurses speed up diagnoses and pick out trends and patterns.

Amgen based in USA is changing how AI is innovating predictive care. Amgen is the world’s largest independent biotechnology company, is at the forefront of this change. The company is combining life sciences with data analytics to help tackle serious illnesses like cancer and cardiovascular disease.

Recently at the Aspen Ideas summit: Health in Colorado, Amgen discussed ways its Digital Health & Innovation (DH&I) team is using advanced data analytics techniques like artificial intelligence to solve problems for patients.
Amgen is a company that uses cutting-edge science and technology to study the subtlest biological mechanisms in search of therapies that will improve the lives of those who suffer from serious diseases. Amgen believes the cure for disease can be found inside each and every one of us. See what they have been up to below:

Boosting the accuracy of risk predictions.

In the U.S., half of all women over the age of 50 will have an osteoporosis-related bone break in her lifetime.Yet less than half of all patients with osteoporosis are ever diagnosed, and just 25 percent ever receive treatment.Leveraging historical data already on file, Amgen is attempting to address this gap with two calls to action: 1) reduce the risk prediction window from 10 to two years; 2) drive increased awareness of near-term facture risk to support appropriate osteoporosis diagnosis for patients.

Amgen built a sequential neural network, capable of learning order dependence in sequence prediction problems.These approaches, inspired from state-of-the-art natural language processing algorithms, have shown relevance to healthcare applications in recent research.The models learned “fingerprints” of patients in a latent vector space to estimate sequences more commonly associated with facture patients and used a tree-based model to predict risk.Together, the neural network and sequence prediction have shown promising early results in predicting imminent fractures from the historical data set.

Making patient care more intuitive.

It’s no secret that healthcare in the U.S. is in need of change.This $3.5 trillion industry has not yet been disrupted.In Singapore the healthcare system requires an up lift on implementing AI too.

Using data to determine the most effective treatment for individual patients.

Multiple myeloma (MM) is a rare, complex blood cancer with no known cure, and represents just two percent of all cancers.Many patients receiving the diagnosis have never heard of this incurable disease but have to learn quickly to map out treatment options with an oncologist or hematologist.

Amgen is now striving to arm clinicians with insights into the patient response of different therapies, thereby improving patient outcomes throughout the treatment journey.Amgen has partnered with GNS Healthcare (a US-based company), which specializes in analyzing both clinical trial and real-world data to model patient response to treatment using artificial intelligence and Bayesian modeling to play out different “what if” scenarios.

Supporting compliance via real-time answers.

Internally, Amgen is using AI to drive activities across the company with an eye for improving how it operates and fulfills its mission to serve patients.Specifically, it’s using technology to support one of its core tenets: do the right thing.In an industry where patients are involved, there is no room for error.

Amgen recognized that by pushing the boundaries of advanced text recognition, artificial intelligence could be used to provide real-time answers to questions related to compliance and regulations.Collaborating with Avata Intelligence, a leader in AI for enterprise-level solutions, Amgen created ASK, an application that uses AI and natural language processing to provide fast answers with accuracy, consistency, and confidence.

“At Amgen, our mission is to serve patients.We’re proud to be leading the way in biotechnology with advanced data analytic techniques and emerging technology solutions to help bring about this overdue transformation for patient,” said Patrick Dey, vice president of Digital Health & Innovation at Amgen.

Learn more about how Amgen is building a better biotech at www.amgen.com .

A New Way To Travel: The Future Concept ‘Car’ Is At Once A Hot-Desk, Hotel Room And Flight cabin, Your Future Is Volvo 360c

6/30/2019

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome on board the Volvo 360c, this is your AI pilot at your service…. It is sci-fi becoming reality.

“In our striving for efficiency, have we lost empathy for the traveler?”

These words, from Volvo’s launch video for its new 360c fully autonomous concept car, hit home with me. I fly much of the time, so I’m fully familiar with efficient but unsympathetic forms of travel, and Volvo’s idea is to help people like me and you through the design of its future cars. The Volvo 360c is, like most concepts of our time, all-electric, fully autonomous, and covered by a big sweeping glass dome. What distinguishes it, though, is Volvo’s vision of how it fits into the broader scheme of city infrastructure, short-haul flights, working commutes, and environmental concerns.

In 2018, Volvo, opened up a broad discussion about the potential for autonomous driving technology to fundamentally change society.

‘The future is not something that just happens – it is something you create, it is about finding different modes of movement for different people’. Volvo Cars’ senior vice president, Marten Levenstam for product strategy talks passionately about the future. The Volvo 360c concept car we are about to see represents a grand vision. It is at once a self-driving office offering hot-desking on the move, as well as a social or business meeting hub with food and champagne, relaxing imagery and moody music. Or it can be a tranquil bedroom – on – wheels – upper-class air travel on land.

This car is “a conversation starter, with more ideas and answers to come as we learn more”, said Marten Levenstam. That leaves a lot of specifics yet to be determined, but Volvo does envision four basic usage scenarios for a car like its 360c. It can serve as a mobile bedroom, replacing red-eye flights with a smoother, calmer, quicker, and more environmentally friendly travel option. It can turn your work commute into a much more productive time, offering the connectivity and space of a mobile office. Or it can be your living room and entertainment space. A modular interior with relevant information projected onto the windows makes flexibility the overriding characteristic of the 360c’s functionality.

This latest research vehicle represents the final stage of autonomous cars when passengers begin moving around in zero-emission driverless connected vehicles, and as Volvo sees it, in complete safety. This is the carmaker who in 1959 invented the three-point seat belt and the marque remains human-centric (or person-centric) as it approach to product development and design. The 360c is fundamentally about researching the safety solutions that will be required when our cars no longer have a human pilot, or when they (the cars) need to speak to one another and to pedestrians. Volvo safety engineers are looking into new forms of seat belts for when we no longer are obliged to sit in stillness in rows of two or three looking at the road ahead, for when we have the freedom to move around our vehicles, sit in multiple ways, having conference meeting, recline and sleep.

The ideas presented today are not necessarily pioneering – BMW and Audi have been at the forefront of setting the initial scene for the autonomous future. What makes 360c especially exciting is how Volvo is using the concept as a channel for dialogue with other car companies, policy makers and government to help find real answers, safety solutions, and a universal language for autonomous driving communication.

Perhaps most intriguingly, the 360c has its gaze on airlines, for Volvo believes there is a viable business plan that could disrupt short distance air travel. In scenario three, the 360c operates as a single-person autonomous vehicle that can pick you up from your home or office, offer you food and drink that has been pre-ordered on your app, lets you recline and relax, watch a movie, sleep, wash up in the morning and be at your final destination with little of the stress of air travel. The company sees its idea, what it calls ‘road planes’, as something it could potentially sell or lease out to airlines. Experiencing the journey, albeit in virtual reality, suggest an interesting alternative to premium travel for distances that can be covered overnight.

In terms of design, the 360c does not attempt to be extraordinary. Instead the Gothenburg team led by Robin Page has focused on what happens inside this architectural bubble encased in a sweeping glass dome. That is not to say it doesn’t look fresh and futuristic. Page feels the design doesn’t sway too far from Volvo’s mainstream cars as it retains that Scandinavian cleanliness. His approach here though was more akin to product design. ‘The four-spec wheel design, typically difficult to do, works with the architectural feel of this car,’ he says.

The cabin is equally devoid of drama. The space has been left clean and clear, the colour codes neutral, for the three scenarios to unfold. Page explains how his team went for natural materials, mainly linen and wool mixes for the upholstery to conjure up the feeling of a living room, office and bedroom. There is also a fair degree of sustainable and recycled materials utilized here including float wood sourced from a nearby lake, treated to automotive standards and placed on the floor area. A special safety blanket has been envisaged to cocoon the passenger inside the sleeper hub. Still in development stage, it is likely to include restraining systems that sense the shape and size of the body to work in similar ways to the current three-point safety belt but with more flexibility.

Communication is also a key area in this concept. A dedicated team has been studying kinemics – body language codes, or how humans around the world interact with other road users. These are then mimicked through light, sound and motion which are transmitted through an LED belt that wraps around the car. Volvo feels there needs to be a universal standard for autonomous communication that is easily followed by all road users in all societies and adopted by all car companies.

Elsewhere, Volvo is exploring the idea of ‘disappearing technology’, keeping all the complex ‘techie’ parts tucked away out of sight. The message here is that Volvo will continue to be a human-centric marque; sister brand Polestar will make cars for those who are excited by extreme technology.

The 360c opens up a broad discussion about the potential for autonomous driving technology to fundamentally change society. ‘The idea is you select what you need on an app and a clean and personalized vehicle arrives at your door, picks you up, drops you off and then disappears,’ explains Page. ‘The office may be the only one you would want to have ownership of; the others will be more like a hotel room where you hand over your keys at the end of the day.’ This is luxury, according to Volvo.

This image of mobility in the next five to ten years is at once innovative and utopian. The marque is working on some more egalitarian concepts, following on from its venture with Uber. Levenstam says he is disappointed with the negative dialogue around future transport. ‘We already have autonomous drive, artificial intelligence and the general infrastructure to do this,’ he explains. ‘Fully autonomous drive has the potential to fundamentally change our society in many ways. It is about the freedom to move. It will have a profound impact on how people travel, how we design our cities and how we use infrastructure. But we are just one of many stakeholders, so we expect and invite a broad discussion as society learns how to make the most of this revolutionary technology. We see the 360c as a conversation starter, with more ideas and answers to come as we learn more.’

Volvo has always prided itself on being a leader in car safety, and the way this company fashions its fully autonomous cars is likely to set the benchmark for good design across the industry.

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A New Coffee Barista at Your Service: SG’s 1st Robot Barista

COMBAT SERIOUS ILLNESS WITH AI: The AMGEN Approach

A New Way To Travel: The Future Concept ‘Car’ Is At Once A Hot-Desk, Hotel Room And Flight cabin, Your Future Is Volvo 360c

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