Smart Nation Fellowship Programme
Singapore is embarking on a journey to build a Smart Nation, with the aim of harnessing technology and data to improve the lives of citizens. If you are an established data scientist, engineer, software developer, technologist, designer or applied researcher, we need your expertise and experience!
Invited Smart Nation Fellows will collaborate with us over three to six months to co-create digital or engineering solutions that will make an impact on people’s lives. Work on projects that we have pre-identified, or propose new, innovative projects across tech domains from artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud, data science, app development, cybersecurity to sensors & IoT.
Hear from our Fellows
- Paul Piong, Staff Firmware Engineer, Tesla
- Hunter Nield, Founder, Acaleph
- Chang Sau Sheong, Managing Director, Singapore Power
- Goh Siew Hong, Senior System Manager, GovTech
- U-Zyn Chua, Principal Consultant, Zynesis
- Arun Kishore, Product Analyst, YouTube
- Gregor Hohpe, Enterprise Strategist, Amazon Web Services
Paul Piong
Staff Firmware Engineer, Tesla
“GovTech serves as the perfect platform for me to collaborate with like-minded individuals, and gives me the opportunity to directly impact Singapore’s drive to become a truly Smart Nation.”
Key Contributions and Projects
From his three-month stint with our Sensors & IoT team, Paul leveraged dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) systems, and developed a proof-of-concept to improve the location accuracy of global positioning system (GPS) technology. The enhanced accuracy of GPS could be used to improve road safety.
Hunter Nield
“My primary motivation for applying for the Smart Nation Fellowship was to be able to positively impact people’s lives. Although I was born in Australia, Singapore has become my home, and I’ve a strong interest in seeing Singapore succeed and help provide the best environment for the nation’s growth into a Smart Nation.”
Key Contributions and Projects
Hunter spent three months with our Application Infrastructure team. He worked on an Object Storage Service project where he designed and developed a Minimum Viable Product for enabling Internet objects to be made available to Intranet with access control. During his Fellowship stint, Hunter also conducted learning sessions for GovTech developers on topics such as DevOps, Kubernetes, and Blockchain.
Chang Sau Sheong
Managing Director, Singapore Power
Key Contributions and Projects
Sau Sheong guided the Government Digital Services team working on the Whole-of-Government Application Analytics (WOGAA) project to identify potential performance bottlenecks, possible ways to optimise the application, and design/architecture for the storage & handling of data. (WOGGA) is an application that helps provide a common set of metrics and measurements to enable public sector agencies to monitor the performance of websites and digital services in real-time. This will in turn help improve public service delivery, set more effective web and mobile strategies and provide insights for policy making.
Goh Siew Hong
Senior System Engineer, GovTech
“With this programme, there’s actually greater sense of satisfaction knowing that this research project has the potential to benefit the society”
Key Contributions and Projects
Siew Hong spent six months with our Sensors and IoT team to develop a standard communication framework to allow integration with healthcare robots, a first of its kind to accelerate robotics development for healthcare sector. This includes standardisation of robotics sensors and intelligent packages which encourages code reusability. The middleware will also standardise communication and integration between smart systems which translate to a standardised healthcare smart systems specification for all future systems acquisition.
U-Zyn Chua
“It is visionary of Singapore to announce the Smart Nation initiative and be one of world leaders to drive technology innovations for public good. I knew I had to apply for the Smart Nation Fellowship as this is an opportunity for me to contribute to the Smart Nation initiative. I am honoured to be selected for the inaugural batch of Fellows, and hope to leverage on blockchain technology to work on projects for public good.”
Key Contributions and Projects
U-Zyn spent six months working with GovTech’s emerging tech team to create ‘Smart Node’, an open ecosystem of service procurements backed by blockchain for smart homes and offices. Through the shared wallet, smart appliances are able to procure services on-demand and automatically whenever supply runs low. During his stint, U-Zyn collaborated with online concierge and delivery service, Honestbee, on this experiment. As an open source software advocate, U-Zyn is delighted that GovTech is advocating the open source movement, which makes his work available to the wider tech community.
Arun Kishore
“Singapore is setting an example for the rest of the world with its Smart Nation initiative and bringing data- driven decision-making into government. As a member of the inaugural batch of Smart Nation Fellows, I am thrilled to be part of this vision. I see this as a unique opportunity to apply my data analysis skills towards helping the government make better decisions and solving problems that impact millions of Singaporeans.”
Key Contributions and Projects
Arun spent three months in Singapore, and worked with GovTech’s data scientists on enhancements to Singapore’s open data portal, Data.gov.sg. Arun worked on building an exploration tool that allowed users to mash data from different datasets to create new insights. Arun also worked on Beeline https://www.beeline.sg, an open smart mobility platform developed by GovTech to empower commuters to crowd-start and activate more direct, private express bus routes to suit their travel needs. Arun helped the Beeline team to build data pipelines to track the success of their acquisition strategy and ways to retain and engage commuters.
Gregor Hohpe
Enterprise Strategist, Amazon Web Services
“Working with GovTech under the Smart Nation Fellowship presented a unique opportunity for applying technology to positively affect citizens’ lives. GovTech equips public sector agencies with tools and platforms for faster innovation and more secure operations, allowing me to amplify my contributions across the whole of government. It also allowed me to get a flavour of Singapore’s ‘secret sauce’ of running the public sector in such an efficient and effective way.”
Key Contributions and Projects
Gregor’s contributions ranged from helping shape the IT strategy to coding all the way down in the IT ‘engine room’. During his nine-month stint, he established architectural practice and discipline to help channel the development teams’ energy and detect potential overlaps or gaps in GovTech’s products. Shaping a cohesive Engineering Productivity team helped operationalise GovTech’s cloud ambitions and the ‘Tech Stack’ platform strategy. Being able to articulate strategy and implementation across organisational layers created greater transparency and effective prioritization. To stay grounded, he also paired up with engineers; one example was to debug web worker concurrency issues to speed up the end-to-end encryption and decryption of data.
https://www.tech.gov.sg/careers/smart-nation-fellowship-programme/