ITE will have access to National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore’s supercomputing resources. This is agreed in the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed between the two organisations in a virtual ceremony on 2 October 2020. The HPC technology is a significant boost to ITE’s artificial intelligence (AI) projects, pedagogy and training.
“Our partnership with NSCC plays a crucial role in enhancing the technological capabilities of ITE’s teaching and training programmes. The staff can leverage high computing power to experiment and innovate while the students will have access to this super computing for their learning and projects,” said Ms Low Khah Gek, Chief Executive Officer, ITE.
Examples of ITE’s innovations for pedagogy and assessment are:
- In-Class Video Analytics of Students to analyse emotions and non-verbal cues of students and provide a sentiment scoring matrix for lecturers to identify topics that are well-received by students and areas of lesson delivery that need improvement; and
- Video Analytics and AI-enabled Assessment of Practical Skills to assess students as they don smart-glasses and perform timed practical tasks such as servicing or operating machinery and equipment.
“With the supercomputers, speed, ease of use, accuracy and productivity of such AI-related innovations would be greatly improved,” added Ms Low.
“HPC will play a key role in the development of smart nation innovations as digitalisation accelerates and a greater number of complex technological applications come online,” said Associate Professor Tan Tin Wee, Chief Executive of NSCC. “Apart from providing local researchers with easy access to national supercomputing resources and capabilities to create new smart nation innovations, it is equally important to get our youth started early on HPC to nurture the next generation of data scientists, genomics researchers, advanced manufacturing technologists and AI scientists.”
ITE and NSCC will also explore co-organising HPC workshops for students and student competitions in areas like AI applications.