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"How we leverage on science and technology will shape and define the future."
Minister for Defence Teo Chee Hean shared this insight with the award winners and participants of the 2008 Tan Kah Kee Young Inventors' Award on 21 Jun.
They were students from primary and secondary schools, Institutes of Technical Education, Polytechnics and tertiary institutions, who had come up with creative inventions that might have commercial potential.
Organised by the Tan Kah Kee Foundation in collaboration with the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) and Defence Science & Technology Agency (DSTA), with the support of the Singapore Science Centre, the award aims to stimulate creativity among young Singaporeans to promote an innovative and inventive culture.
Since it was mooted by Nobel Laureate Professor Yang Chen Ning in May 1986, the award has gained much recognition and legitimacy in the scientific world, with judges seeing over a thousand entries this year.
2008 also marks the introduction of the Junior Student section of project judging. This was introduced, said Dr Low Hwee Boon, Co-Chairman of the Tan Kah Kee Young Inventors' Award Committee, to ensure primary school students would not be disadvantaged going up against the more sophisticated prototypes of their older competitors.
Response to the creation of this new section has been encouraging, he continued, noting that the Junior Student section had received 300 entries, approximately a third of the total number of entries.
As part of its ongoing mission to raise awareness of, and increase participation in, the field of defence science and technology in Singapore, DSTA entered into a partnership with the award's organisers in 2002, resulting in the establishment of this section.
Cyberpioneer spoke to a team from Temasek Polytechnic who submitted a project called Emergency Prank Call Surveillance System.
This simple yet inventive project was the solution to a problem that 20-year-old Sherman Leow felt was plaguing law enforcement agencies: prank calls. Noting from the local media that the number of prank calls that emergency hotlines were receiving was on the rise, the team felt that a solution had to be put in place to identify callers as well as the location from which these calls were made.
His teammate, Mohammed Nazir Bin Kamaldin, offered further analysis into the applicability of their project: with publicity for the use of such a tool, people would be deterred from making prank calls in the first place.
For this ingenious invention to combat a long-existing problem, the team received the top prize in the Defence Science section - the Merit Award.
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