Speech by Mr Lui Tuck Yew, Minister for Transport and Second Minister for Defence, at the 2015 Singapore Amazing Machine Competition (SAMC) Awards Presentation Ceremony

Introduction

Good afternoon! Really excited to be here. Excited both to go and see what you have done over the past couple of days as well as excited for you. Because the video and some of the remarks that were made to me as I was coming in lead me to believe that this afternoon is going to be quite an enjoyable one. So, I look forward to seeing the demonstrations, because I don't think the video did full justice to all the hard work that you have put in.

Science and Technology (S&T) is exciting and useful

We celebrate Singapore's 50th anniversary this entire year, and of course this month is a very special one.. A wonderful display at the Padang, at the surrounding areas, the Black Knights, incredible close quarter manoeuvres performed at super-sonic speed, all aircraft flying at close-proximity to each other. It was an impressive demonstration of man and machine.

When the Wright Brothers first started flying more than a hundred years ago, guess what was the distance that they achieved? 37 metres. That's what they achieved. And I think that if they were alive today, they would be amazed by how far it has come, and the modern advances in aviation that we are currently enjoying.

Today's generation of aircraft continues to break new grounds. Some  of  you  may have heard of Solar Impulse II, which was an experimental solar-powered aircraft that recently flew non-stop for five days and nights from Japan to Hawaii. It relies on solar technology and rechargeable batteries for power. Such an aircraft - it aims to fly across the globe without using a single drop of fuel - will help us to learn many lessons for the future. And if you can imagine that somehow this technology can be matured enough, that we can apply it maybe 30, 40 years from now to aircraft. Can you imagine what air travel will be like? I think you will certainly expect it to be cheaper and cleaner because of the reduced reliance on jet fuel.

I think we know science is not just fascinating and wonderful. It is actually useful and impactful on our everyday lives. So, take for example the mobile phone. Everyone has one here, some of the adults will have more than two. Some for work, some for communicating with your friends and other purposes. But it's become a must-have, a real indispensable item. It helps us stay connected, gets us updated with the latest information, gets us organised, helps us run errands online, and we are entertained by it too. It's certainly changed the way we live, work and play in modern society. A friend of mine recently told me that it is okay to forget your wallet, but it is not okay to forget your mobile phone. And such a comment would have been unimaginable even just ten years ago.

Harnessing S&T to improve lives

So science can enhance and improve the way we live. But to make it impactful and useful, we need creative and critical thinkers who will develop fresh solutions to the challenges that we face in society. So from intelligent systems to managing our high-density environment, to dedicated healthcare for looking after our ageing society, our future will depend in part on our ability to rise  above our limitations, and develop new innovations to meet our requirements.

Some of you would have heard of the Smart Nation initiative. Many different components, but if you take smart transport for example, Smart Mobility. It is really to equip ourselves with the information that can be translated into giving us accurate and timely data that will allow us to make more informed choices. Or autonomous and driverless vehicles that are being tested today, and that will one day allow us to have more point to point options beyond the cars that we rely on.

Smart Nation is about Smart Living too. So, the HDB is piloting the Smart Elderly Monitoring and Alert System, which uses a combination of sensors so that if the system detects something out of the ordinary, it will raise the alarm, it will alert family members or neighbours. And healthcare can also be delivered directly to the home. So rather than the patient going to the polyclinic or the hospital, it is the polyclinic, the doctors, the nurses going virtually or sometimes physically to where the  patient  is. So, instead of consulting your doctor physically at the point where he is based, you can do so by virtual links, and you can allow the patient to do it in a more comfortable setting – his or her own home.

A Nation of Inspiring Innovators

I think there are many examples of some of the inventions that our students are putting together that makes an impact on life in Singapore. There is this group of third-year engineering students from Singapore Polytechnic (SP). They devised a system that can automatically maintain the temperature of beds at an optimal 25 degrees Celsius. This is not talking about air conditioning, but maintaining a bed temperature at 25 degrees  Celsius. Why is that important? Who does it serve? It is for patients that are bedbound, and if you do not turn the patient over occasionally, then the patient will develop bedsores. So what they have developed is able to incorporate sensors that will notify nurses to change the patient's position in the bed every two hours and even to detect whether the patient has fallen off the bed.

I'll take another young Singaporean in a different part of the world, by the name  of Benjamin Tee. He's part of a global team that is seeking to invent electronic skin or e-skin.
 
This area of research is at the forefront of science and technology because it hopes to create the material that mimics the features of real skin. This requires the synthetic skin to sense the environment, to flex to stretch, and even to self-heal! So, imagine the potential of this to help those who are suffering from severe burns. It will change how prosthetic body parts function, as it will allow users to feel and experience sensations.

Conclusion

So, what does it really take? We talked about science, we talked about inventions. What does it really take? I think the experience from the last few days and even from your journey and your experimentation is that it takes teamwork. We imagine that sometimes, there's this single individual, locked in the lab and he works on it day and night for ten years, and you finally have something that is earth-shaking and breaks the boundaries of science and whatever it is.

I think that is often not the case. It is people living together, working together, bouncing their ideas off each other. Iron sharpening iron. And that is how you get the best ideas to surface, and the best inventions to come to the fore. So it is learning to work with each other, learning that the person working beside you is not your competitor. Instead, he or she is your collaborator, and that there is room enough for people to be working side by side. Enough accolades to be shared among the team members. I say it as the first thing.

The second thing is that it usually means breaking new ground. It usually means going into the realm of the uncharted. I don't know how many of you played chess. How many of you play chess? Give me a show of hands. Quite a few of you, right? Those of you who are serious about chess would have been reading up, you know, about, you know the Sicilian Defence, the Ruy Lupez, and whatever else you have. You watch the grandmasters play. The first 15, 20 moves - absolutely boring. Very fast, but absolutely boring because everybody follows the script. Nothing deviates.

But the middle of the game is when it's most interesting. It's when it's most interesting because somebody makes a new move, and it requires the opponent to think at the conjecture what it will be like 3, 5 moves  further  down  the  game. Because it is quite different from what has taken place before.

If the grandmasters were to memorise games that were played years and years ago, in their minds, not quite Deep Blue and Gary Kasparov, but in their minds, they would have stored hundreds of games. But someone in the midst of that game would be able to chart new territory. And that's when it becomes the most interesting. It is when you  are  able to deviate from the script, when you are able to explore new grounds, when you are able to get into uncharted territory. That is when it is at its most exciting.

And so, I think for scientists, it is to prepare yourself that not everything will work as you plan and you conjecture it to be, and to believe that where you will learn the most is when things happen in an unexpected manner, when it goes off the charted path. And you have to prepare yourselves well, to learn and extract the best lessons from those developments.

And I think those people sitting in the front row, in the centre parts here, I think will probably not see SG100. Quite safe to say. But you, the rest of you, most of you will get to live to SG100. And you will be able to remember SG50, this competition, the celebrations this month, and contrast it 50 years from now. As to what Singapore has become, as to what inventions and what achievements would have made the most significant impact on our society. And it is up to you and people of your generation to make Singapore an even better home for all of us in the years to come.

So I urge you to continue to be both a tinkerer, but more importantly, a doer. As aspiring innovators, I hope we can count on you to find opportunities where challenges emerge, and find solutions today so that all of us can have a better tomorrow. To all participants, and especially to the winners, my heartiest congratulations! I hope you are proud of what you are able to accomplish together as a team, and I urge you to spur yourselves to greater heights in the years to come!

Thank you very much.