The COVID-19 pandemic has affected everyone, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives and disrupting the livelihood of millions.

AI has the potential to transform our economy and improve lives. Given this unprecedented global crisis, AISG launched an ideation challenge, with the aim to encourage the curation of innovative ideas using AI methods and technologies help Singapore emerge stronger and better from the current situation caused by the coronavirus.

The challenge was open to all students at Singapore public educational institutions i.e. secondary to university. They could participate as a team of 1-4 members. Each proposal was reviewed based on the following criteria: Innovation (novelty and creativity of the idea), Value-add (how much would society benefit from such a solution), Relevance (how AI-focused is the proposed approach, how well does it address the problems caused by Covid-19), Feasibility (in terms of implementation, scalability and cost). The Review Panel comprised representatives from AISG, National AI Office and MOH Office for Healthcare Transformation. The ten best proposals were selected and awarded SGD1000 each.

“We were heartened to receive more than 170 entries from secondary schools, ITE, JCs, and Polytechnics as well as Universities.  The submissions were very diverse in terms of topics, use cases, age groups as well as institutions.  In view of the current situation, one would expect that a lot of proposals focus on health, but a good number also considered the secondary effects of the pandemic e.g. mental health, home-based-learning and teaching, supporting people who have lost jobs, how to get groceries etc.” said Stefan Winkler, Deputy Director of AI Technology, AISG.

A virtual award ceremony was conducted on 30 July 2020 to acknowledge our winners. In attendance were 6 winners who each gave a short presentation on their winning proposal to the rest.

Once again, we would like to thank everyone who has taken part in this Ideation Challenge and our heartiest congratulations to the following 10 winning teams.

Click here for the summary of each proposal.