The winning teams are announced for this year’s Tech4City Prize! The top five teams will receive mentorship and technical training, as well as up to $2,000 funding for their prototypes. The winners also get to showcase their ideas at the finals in November, which will be attended by the Prime Minister of Singapore, Dr Lee Hsien Loong.
The event was organised by the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) in partnership with Huawei Technologies and CSIRO, to support the development of a Singapore digital economy. Its goal is to encourage companies, startups and organisations of all sizes to develop, test and validate their innovative digital technology solutions for the public and private sectors, and provide a platform for them to present their prototypes and solutions to potential funders and investors.
A total of 17 writers, translators and comic artists received the prestigious award in this year’s program, which was held at the National Library of Singapore on Tuesday. President Tharman Shanmugaratnam was the guest-of-honour for the ceremony, which saw the winners being awarded their prizes in four languages.
In the English literary category, writer Clara Chow became the first to be shortlisted in three categories and two languages in this year’s competition. Her shortlisting in the Chinese poetry and English creative nonfiction sections follows a nomination for her debut book, Down Memory Lane, which is a memoir that crosses several historical periods.
Winners in the Science and Technology category included a team who developed a solution to motivate senior citizens to be more active through interactive games. The haptic system allows players to feel their hand movements on a screen, giving them an immersive gaming experience that can be used in various age groups and fitness levels. The team aims to scale up their technology, with the help of this grant, and implement it in multiple active ageing centres across Singapore.
Other categories saw the likes of a researcher who created a game to train children to recognise faces and learn about facial expressions, an author who has written books on the history of Singapore, and a historian whose work is about how different cultures interacted in Southeast Asia. The NUS Singapore History Prize is administered by the Department of History at NUS’ Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, and casts a wide net for works that deal with history.
The prize was launched in 2014 after an anonymous donor made an endowment gift to the University of Singapore. It is open to works published in, or translated into, English and is awarded every three years. The shortlist is publicly announced and featured on the prize program website, and the winning book receives a cash prize of $50,000 Singapore. The program is supported by the National Museums Board of Singapore and Singapore Pools. Click here for more information on the prize. This is Publishing Perspectives’ 131st awards-related report in the past 137 publication days, and more on Singapore’s publishing scene can be found here.