STACK 2022 Developer Conference | Singapore Government Developer Portal
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Lightning Talks


Tuesday (15/11/22)

02:00 PM - 02:15 PM

Transform the Way You Transact with Singpass API

Learn how organisations can leverage on Singpass Transact APIs for the purpose of exchanging information and making decisions. The session is meant for business users and developers exploring to streamline their digital journey.

Theme: Building Digital Trust

Who should attend

Business Partners, Government Officers, Transformation Partners, Developers.

Speaker(s)

Roland is a Lead Product Manager at GovTech, National Digital Identity, delivering transact APIs which aims to enable organisations in providing seamless digital journey to their customers.

02:00 PM - 02:15 PM

Application Modernisation: The Elephants in the Room

It’s a common story: someone from the business wants to develop a new feature and delivery teams are excited to work on something new. But… a huge system lurking in the background is hard to change and slows everybody down. Most application modernisation initiatives seeking to improve such situations tend to be long and risky affairs driven by IT departments, while business stakeholders are unconvinced and reluctant to lend their support.

In this talk, we will share how the Economic Development Board (EDB) and VMware Tanzu Labs tamed the ‘elephants’ in the room by using the Swift method to:
- Understand how a monolithic legacy system supports existing business flows.
- Future-proof an existing system by re-architecting it to be flexible to change.
- Start small and make incremental gains with buy-in from the business.

Join us if you’re any of the following

- A stressed and under-funded IT stakeholder
- A frustrated and disgruntled business user
- A jaded and overworked software delivery team.

Speaker(s)

Jern Kuan Leong is a Project Director at EDB, leading and growing software engineering teams within EDB. He has been spearheading the modernization effort of EDB internal systems, lowering the barrier to introducing new products. In his previous life, he used to develop UX for self-driving vehicles and video games for a living. He still enjoys coding and savors every opportunity to code.

Liza Ng is a Senior Member of Technical Staff at VMware Tanzu Labs (formerly known as Pivotal Labs), where she guides clients in shaping their software products, systems and teams. She usually (officially) plays the role of a software engineer, but occasionally pretends to be a technical product manager in the hope of bringing business and technical perspectives closer together.

02:00 PM - 02:15 PM

Continuous Integration and Delivery in 2022 - What's Next?

Continuous integration and delivery (CICD for short) has evolved quite a bit in the last few years, and in 2022 there are an abundance of different tools and methodologies for software developers to recruit in order to deliver their products to the market faster. In this talk, Aries will highlight some of these best practices, as well as dive into the future of what CICD looks like. Topics such as managing complex application state, application dependency management, and continuous security as a part of CI will be covered.

Theme: Fail-Safe App Development

Who should attend

Attendees in the cloud, application engineering, DevOps, DevSecOps, and computer, network and cyber security would benefit from this talk.

Speaker(s)

Aries Youssefian is a product architect working for CloudCover, a cloud-native systems integration and software delivery company based in Singapore. He is primarily focused on building the next generation of developer tooling and platforms for an increasingly hyper-converged cloud and software world. Prior to CloudCover, Aries worked for software startups Stratoscale and Tesora, and is also an alumnus of Dell and VMware. He holds a Bachelors of Information Technology (Honours) from the University of Ontario Institute of Technology in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada.

02:00 PM - 02:15 PM

AI Driven Smart City

Imagine driving your car and looking for a place to park. You speak to your phone, asking for the nearest available parking slot. After a short while, you get a verbal response giving you direction to the nearest and available slot. A few technologies are at play here. First, we need to train a Deep Learning model to make accurate inferences. After that, the model can be deployed close to the data source to process the video frames. This is where Edge Computing comes into play, running the algorithm with the trained model. Through chatbots, analytics, database, AI and other solutions, you can be guided to the nearest slot. This presentation touches on several smart city use cases and the associated data pipeline as well as some of the key technologies and considerations to make our city smarter.

Theme: Smart City: Vision to Reality

Who should attend

IT practitioners, town planners and others.

Speaker(s)

Francis Han has 32 years of IT experience across Artificial Intelligence, Analytics, Enterprise Solutions, and Smart City domains. During the last 20 years in Oracle, Francis has assumed roles in consulting, presales, sales, as well as technical leadership positions. He is currently Senior Director, responsible for the Oracle Solution Centers across the JAPAC region and is a keen evangelist of cutting-edge technologies.

02:15 PM - 02:30 PM

Authenticated Communication for Building Digital Trust

In this digital era, everything has moved online, even for frauds and scams. Be it spoofed websites, phishing emails, fake SMSes and calls, and various other creative ways of scamming the people are only on the rise. Government websites and other communication channels are especially vulnerable to scams as citizens may easily fall prey. It is thus vital to know what can be trusted on the Internet. At OGP, we believe in bringing public officers and the citizens together to fight scams, by providing means of building digital trust and secure collaboration. We will talk about GoGovSG and ForSG, a link shortener that authenticates communication between public officers and citizens. We will highlight the impact of this product and how it will continue to develop to play a role in our nation's defense-in-depth strategy against scams.

Theme: Building Digital Trust

Who should attend

Public officers, members of the public.

Speaker(s)

Hena Shah is an engineer-turned-product manager. She is the product manager for GoGovSG and its sister products (ForEduSG and ForSG) at Open Government Products.

02:15 PM - 02:30 PM

Policy as Code

At Google, we build technology that helps people do more for the planet. For the STACK 2022 session, we will showcase a want to propose a deep dive and demo on a revolutionary technology from Google called Kubernetes config connector, which helps to simplify compliance and DevSecOps, FinOps.

Theme: Fail-Safe App Development

Who should attend

Application Developers, Infra as code developers, Security Analyst.

Speaker(s)

Ramneek Khurana is a technical hands-on leader with 16+ years of experience in the financial and consulting industries. He enjoys applying technology with a data-driven eye to identify problems and build innovative solutions to improve customer experience. He believes in great ideas and stronger execution. Delivery is of paramount value to him. His focus has always been on producing small, incremental improvements to customer experience through engineering technical innovation. In his current role at Google as a Customer Engineer, he works with some of the largest financial institutions on building their cloud strategy, choosing right solutions on cloud with appropriate price/performance ratios while ensuring FSI industry compliance on the cloud.

02:15 PM - 02:30 PM

Multi-cluster Release Workflow

With the widespread adoption of Kubernetes in organisations, engineering teams have found themselves managing a variety of clusters that differ in scale and usage. As the number of clusters grow, the complexity in managing them introduces new challenges for engineers to tackle. Maintaining clusters involves frequent changes related to upgrades, security and adding new components; a multi-cluster setup further complicates these operations. For engineering teams to be efficient and productive, an ideal multi-cluster management strategy and release workflow is paramount.

This session aims to showcase how a multi-cluster release workflow can reduce operational overheads and streamline the cluster management with the aid of automation and GitOps best practices.

Theme: Fail-Safe App Development

Who should attend

DevOps Practitioners, SREs, DevOps Engineers, Software Engineers. Knowledge in CI/CD, Git, GitOps and/or Kubernetes are a plus.

Speaker(s)

Ernest Boey, DevOps Engineer, GDS ENP Ernest is an Associate DevOps Engineer for Container Stack. In his role, he designs the CI/CD workflows that are used internally and by other Government agencies. These workflows make use of tools and methodologies like GitLab CI and GitOps. He works collaboratively with his stakeholders to set up automated pipelines and infrastructure for greater productivity. In his free time, he enjoys building keyboards and playing darts.

Azman Salleh, DevOps Engineer, GDS ENP Azman is an Associate DevOps Engineer for Container Stack. His day to day involves him automating Kubernetes workloads and enhancing GitOps workflow. He enjoys reading up on open source DevOps tools that can level up his team. When not working, he enjoys collecting trading cards and gaming with his friends.

02:15 PM - 02:30 PM

Crowd Density Monitoring in Outdoor Environments with Edge AI

Crowd counting outdoors is a challenging problem as there are no defined entrances and exits. Furthermore, using existing CCTVs may not always be ideal to detect and count people accurately due to factors such as camera mounting height, field-of-view and lighting conditions. In this talk, we present our work developing cloud-connected edge AI solutions that count the number of people present in outdoor spaces. This will provide facility operators with the real-time information they need to manage these spaces. We will provide an overview of the system architecture, hardware, algorithms, software and backend monitoring elements of our solution, as well as results from deployments.

Theme: Smart City: Vision to Reality

Who should attend

AI Technologists, Developers, Computer Vision Engineers.

Speaker(s)

Kelvin is a Systems Engineer with the Sensors & IoT department at Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech), where he works on developing and deploying Vision AI applications on the edge.

02:30 PM - 02:45 PM

Composing a Solution for Composing Documents?

We will be introducing the development journey of docComposer, previously known as ChopChopDoc. docComposer is definitely one of the more agile and bold cross-agency projects we've had so far!

The presentation will be sharing about our onboarding to CStack, and our close collaboration with OGP and GovTech. We would also like to share how CPFB management has given the team the freedom and trust to build these products, giving us the opportunity to innovate not just for CPFB but for WOG too.

Theme: Government Track

Agenda

- Intro to our team at CPFB, Frontier Products Team
- Intro to docComposer
- Usage of products from other agencies (CStack, FormSG)
- Deployment journey on CStack (by Akmal)
- Our discussions/collaboration with other agencies
- CPFB management giving us freedom, allowing us to work faster and smarter

Background below: docComposer originated in CPFB's Automation Lab, which then collaborated with OGP during Hack for Public Good 2021. With the newly formed Frontier Products Team in CPFB, we have taken back the development and running of docComposer, rebuilding it partially to be JS-based and deployed on cloud. The close integration with FormSG and usage of the new CStack led to many discussions and beta-testing signups with OGP and GovTech. As existing users of ChopChopDoc, HDB has been involved in user testing also.

Who should attend

All Developers, especially those looking to deploy containerised applications on GCC.

Speaker(s)

Eugene is a budding full-stack developer, having worked primarily on the frontend of docComposer.

Akmal is the main DevSecOps guy who has been single-handedly deploying the team's products onto CStack/GCC2.0.

02:30 PM - 02:45 PM

The Combination of Digital Technologies

The future is increasingly hyper-connected, politically and technologically fractured, and filled with carbon markets. These disruptive trends give rise to new use cases, for example, in healthcare, maritime, and forestry domains. We discuss the new use cases with a combination of digital technologies, such as Data and AI / ML, Cloud, 5G, Satellite Communications, Un-manned Tech, AR/VR/MR/XR, and Cybersecurity.

Theme: Tech for Tomorrow

Who should attend

Anyone interested in digital, especially AI/ML, 5G/6G, and the metaverse.

Speaker(s)

Clifton Phua is Chief Technology Officer of Digital Systems at ST Engineering. He looks after the R&D and productisation roadmaps of digital systems, especially in Data and AI, Cloud or Edge Computing, 5G or 6G, Satellite Communications or Imaging, Autonomous or Unmanned Tech, AR/VR/MR/XR, and Cybersecurity.

Previously, Clifton was Regional Vice President at DataRobot focusing on data science practice in Asia Pacific, Director at NCS leading their data scientist team, and data scientist at SAS and A*STAR.

Clifton graduated with a PhD and Bachelors (first class honours) in Information Technology from Monash University in Australia. He has completed the INSEAD Advanced Management Program.

02:30 PM - 02:45 PM

Know Your Data Next Generation Data Intelligence & Governance

My talk will share how we can deploy effective methodologies to generate the next generation of data intelligence and governance.

Theme: Datafication

Who should attend

Data leaders, Chief Data Officer, Data analyst, Scientist, Developers and Business Analysts.

Speaker(s)

Technology Leader with 16+ years in delivering bespoke technology solutions by engaging agile and waterfall methodologies. Seasoned in Program and Project management in Banking and Consulting Industry. Diverse professional exposure in international settings across India, Singapore, United Kingdom and the Middle East (Riyadh/Dubai). Outstanding track record in automation, artificial intelligence, data analytics, business intelligence, Innovation, business transformation, governance, migration and architecture. Proven abilities in leading high-performing, multi-cultural and cross-functional teams in the delivery of multiple concurrent projects and operations of technology solutions. An excellent communicator capable of translating complex technical ideas into actionable solutions. Excellent ability in engaging clients, vendors, stakeholders across all levels to bring commercial and business growth and achieve organisational KPIs.

02:30 PM - 02:45 PM

GCC 2.0, The Bold Step Forward

Government Commercial Cloud (GCC) 1.0 was launched in 2018 as a “wrapper” platform that provides government agencies with a consistent means to adopt commercial cloud solutions. However, feedback received include concerns over the tedious process of onboarding the GCC, increased need for automation, cloud native solutions and for less service requests. The redesigning of GCC gave rise to GCC 2.0 which various refinement from the first version of the platform.

This presentation will share the vision and key benefits of GCC 2.0, and how the design leads to acceleration of service delivery and service improvements for citizens and businesses.

Theme: Beyond Cloud

Who should attend

IT professionals who are interested to learn more about what Government Commercial Cloud has to offer.

Speaker(s)

A passionate architect and technical leader, Bing Wan started his career as a software developer (Informix, Java, C) focusing on both banking and shipping domains. He developed a passion in IT infrastructure, security and operations, which guided his subsequent work as an architect even as the landscape shifted from on-premise/physical, virtualisation to cloud, microservices, and trust-based security paradigm. In his most recent role as Director (Codex/Government Commercial Cloud), he further honed his skills in enabling a team of fellow passionate professionals to re-factor systems, IT operating model and culture on to commercial cloud. His most current interest and focus area is on cloud automation/software defined infrastructure strategy across Singapore's whole-of-government. He is currently an AWS Certified Architect (Professional) and a Certified Scrum Master.

02:45 PM - 03:00 PM

Improving Government Services with Data: Best Practices, Tips and Insights from WOGAA

Singaporeans’ love for the internet is undeniable. According to a 2020 study, almost 90% of the population uses the internet, with an average time spent of 8 hours a day. With such a high internet penetration rate, providing a good web browsing experience to consumers is paramount. What are some of the factors contributing to a good digital experience? In terms of usability, the website must be readily available, load quickly and is easily searchable, so as to deliver its intended outcome to users of all demographics and abilities in a simple and efficient manner. At the same time, as we strive towards becoming a more inclusive society, web accessibility is also becoming a major priority, to make sure that a person with disabilities or physical limitations has equal access to the content like the rest of the online community. Over the years, the Whole-of-Government Application Analytics (WOGAA) has developed services to help agencies have a better grasp of how their digital services are performing, as the Singapore government strives towards the Digital Government Blueprint’s goal of becoming a "digital-to-the-core Government that serves with heart". In this presentation, we hope to shed more light on how WOGAA helps to drive agencies to achieve excellence in areas such as usability, digital service availability and web content accessibility. This includes initiatives such as the Digital Service Awards, which provides positive reinforcement to motivate public officers to improve their digital services, as well as the Digital Service Dashboard, incorporating a set of KPIs to nudge agencies to achieve service excellence in areas such as Web Accessibility and Search Engine Optimisation. As Steve Jobs once said, "If a user is having a problem, it's our problem." We hope that service owners recognise that usability is a shared responsibility among all stakeholders of a product, and through this presentation, audiences can learn about best practices and gain useful tips on how to better leverage WOGAA to improve their digital services to benefit their end users.

Theme: Government Track

Who should attend

Public officers who use WOGAA, website and digital service owners or anyone who has an interest in web analytics.

Speaker(s)

Seah Ming Shu is a data-driven individual, with over 6 years of experience in data analytics roles. Prior to joining the Public Service, he worked in the media and finance industries, dealing with projects in business intelligence, market research as well as machine learning. Since joining GovTech in January 2020, he has been working in the WOGAA team as a data scientist. His job scope includes building data models for various new product features, designing dashboards for product monitoring, as well as conducting workshops for fellow public officers on web analytics.

02:45 PM - 03:00 PM

Networking in GCC 2.0

GCC consists of hundreds of accounts and network compartments (VPCs and VNETs) to segment different tenants and applications. This level of scale creates challenges around scalability, security, agility and segregation of traffic between applications in Cloud, and on-premises.

Let's talk about how to design your highly available and secure multi-cloud networking in a large scale deployment!

Theme: Beyond Cloud

Who should attend

Cloud Engineers and Architects, Network Engineers.

Speaker(s)

Sathiya has over 20 years of on-premise, private and public cloud computing experience.

Sathiya was responsible for the network design in GCC and GCC 2.0. He currently leads the Managed Hosting engineering team in designing and enhancing services to help Agencies host and operate systems in the cloud.

Prior to joining GovTech, Sathiya was a Technical Architect and Database Administrator at StarHub.

02:45 PM - 03:00 PM

Enabling Everyday AI

Since 2013, Dataiku has been the leader in democratising data and empowering organisation-wide collaboration. In this talk, we will cover how some organisations have grasped and implemented robust analytics and AI programs and realised the full potential from these technologies. We will also share how to integrate data and AI organically throughout the organisation, as well as the importance of governance capabilities at an organisational and individual level. We believe that by allowing everyone to imagine, execute, control, and have governance over their work, data and AI become business assets that propel the company forward.

Theme: Datafication

Who should attend

CxOs, Managers, Team leads who are spearheading/ involved in the data transformation journey at their organisations.

Speaker(s)

Hui Xiang Chua is Senior Data Scientist at Dataiku, helping enterprises with data democratisation and enabling them to build their own path to AI. Dataiku is a 2x Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader for Data Science and Machine-Learning Platforms (as of 2021).

02:45 PM - 03:00 PM

Cloud Services for Digital Medicine Framework

When we move towards the future of healthcare, the use of digital medicine will be prevalent. Yet, around the globe, most institutions have yet to develop a framework that ensure the digital medicines we prescribe one day will follow the stringent protocol of the pharmaceutical drug approval. In this talk, we will share how we adopt the software as a medical device framework and how we rationalise the cloud infrastructure that enables us to realise a robust and future proof cloud based digital medicine framework.

Theme: Tech for Tomorrow

Who should attend

Anyone who might be interested in the future of cloud based digital medicine framework and implementation.

Speaker(s)

Kian Bee is the co-director of ALIVE, a research collaboration centre between LKCMedicine and its primary healthcare partner - the National Healthcare Group (NHG).

03:00 PM - 03:15 PM

User Testing for e-Accessibility

With increased digitalisation, more transactions are moving online, be it for commerce, leisure, learning, work or government services. Persons with disabilities will not be able to access important information or perform digital transactions if the content and platforms are not accessible to them. As such, there is an imperative to ensure that digital content and platforms are made accessible to them, especially for critical information and essential services. This session will share about the importance of e-accessibility, and offer tips on how to make your content e-accessible for persons with disabilities as we embark on this Smart City journey.

Theme: Smart City: Vision to Reality

Who should attend

Developers, Content Creators, Owners of customer facing units.

Speaker(s)

As Head, Technology Catalyst at SG Enable, Alvin brings his strength in technology foresight to the Assistive Technology (AT) domain, and seeks to infuse a fresh perspective on the acceptance and use of AT in Singapore. He strongly believes in the potential of technology for social good, and aims to realise this potential through his role in SG Enable. Through technology, he seeks to empower persons with disabilities by enhancing their capabilities in technology use, and help persons with disabilities be more engaged with the society. Alvin holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from Nanyang Technological University.

Josh leads the team at Etch Empathy to provide digital accessible services that make software more inclusive for everyone. With partners at SG Enable, Josh and his team engage organisations to conduct accessibility assessments of apps, consultations, and workshops. As a person with a visual impairment, Josh has experienced part of the struggle other persons with disabilities face when encountering inaccessible software, and hopes to combine his technical experience and communication skills to empower developers with the right understanding to cater to persons with disabilities. Josh is also an avid public speaker and storyteller, promoting inclusivity for persons with disability at events for the likes of TEDx, Microsoft, and the Inclusive Business Forum 2022. Josh has a Bachelor's in Information Systems from Singapore Management University.

03:00 PM - 03:15 PM

Building Inclusive Teams - A Sharing from Women in GovTech ERG (Employment Resource Group)

Join us for an interactive session where we share our journey of setting up the community of Women In (Gov)Tech and learnings along the way. This is not only about women, it is for anyone who is looking to build high performing teams!

Theme: Nurturing the Tech Culture & Careers

Who should attend

Anyone who wants to run or be in happy, inspired innovative tech teams!

Speaker(s)

Sowmya Ramakrishnan is the Chair for the inaugural Women in Tech team at GovTech. She is a Lead Product Manager at GovTech spearheading product marketing and adoption programs under CODEX – a Smart Nation initiative to modernise Government IT systems with cloud technologies. Prior to GovTech, she spent 15 years working in the tech industry. She spent 8 years with Google in regional and global roles leading Go-to-Market teams for Cloud, EdTech and AdTech in Asia Pacific and the US. Her other professional experiences include being a software developer at IBM. She is also running a startup in wellness technology space.

Sowmya holds a Bachelor of Computer Engineering from Nanyang Technological University and a Master of Business Administration from Indian School of Business.

Sowmya is passionate about removing barriers to equity such as creating access to education, uncovering biases, enabling safe space for self-expression. She is also a visual artist, fiction writer and holistic wellness enthusiast.

Liyana is the Vice-Chairperson of GovTech’s Women in (Gov)Tech Group, and the Lead Product Manager for the SG Tech Stack which aims to enable agencies to build better apps with good developer tools and practices.

Liyana also volunteers with The Codette Project, and enjoys travelling and exploring new places. In 2021, Liyana was an awardee of the SG 100 Women in Tech 2021 List.

03:00 PM - 03:15 PM

Exploiting Vulnerabilities and Flaws to Attack Supply Chain

In the supply chain eco-system there are many vulnerable platforms that are trusted by the majority of developers. These platforms can be exploited in a number of ways by attackers.

In this session we will show just a few of these attack vectors and techniques.

We will examine supply chain vulnerabilities and flaws in three sections: source code management (SCM), package managers, and CI/CD.

Theme: Building Digital Trust

Who should attend

Developers that rely on open-source projects, and Developers of open-source projects.

Speaker(s)

Ilay is a Security Researcher at Aqua. As part of Team Nautilus, he discovers different techniques of supply chain attacks and finds vulnerabilities and attack vectors in cloud native environments. Before Aqua, he worked as a red teamer.

Yakir is a Security Researcher at Team Nautilus, Aqua’s research team. He focuses on finding and researching new vulnerabilities and attack vectors in cloud native environments. Prior to Aqua, he worked as a red teamer.

03:00 PM - 03:15 PM

Demystifying Security and Compliance for Cloud Deployments on GCC 2.0

Meet CloudSCAPE, GovTech's Cloud Security and Compliance Platform Ecosystem. Join us to find out how CloudSCAPE can help Agencies secure their Cloud deployments on GCC 2.0, and simplify compliance processes through automation!

Theme: Fail-Safe App Development

Who should attend

Agency CIOs and IT Directors, Project Managers, Business Analysts, Developers, Solution Architects, Policy Developers, Auditors, Industry Collaborators.

Speaker(s)

With more than 11 years of working experience in the IT and cybersecurity industry, Eugene has delved deep into various technologies in the binary vulnerability and exploitation aspect, and breath across cloud and web security, secure coding, and infrastructure.

At GovTech, he leads the cybersecurity product development team to build a range of products and tools to address cyber hygiene, as well as advanced capabilities to tip the scales to the defender's advantage.

Prior to this, he led efforts in discovering unknown security vulnerabilities in critical Government projects and commonly used software.

03:15 PM - 03:30 PM

How to Develop Cloud Applications Without Cloud?

As most of the applications are moving to cloud it is important to find ways to develop cloud applications with agility, reduced cost, and quick time to market with flexibility to change. In this presentation, We will share:
- how we used this method of local cloud development toolkit for building applications in an agile way.
- how we use localstack to overcome development environment requirements in cloud for serverless apps and native services.
- practical experience using such technique for some important apps which changed the course of things during pandemic, allowing faster time to market where speed is everything.
- planning the development blueprint, reference design, cost optimisation areas, opportunities and next steps for future enhancements.

Theme: Beyond Cloud

Who should attend

Architects and Tech Specialists who are interested in understanding and identifying challenges for Cloud development and designing a Shift Left Cloud development methodology which costs less and allows faster delivery of business apps.

Speaker(s)

Over 19 years of experience in planning, designing and architecting applications. Currently assisting agencies to solution modernised applications using CI / CD, Cloud-native services, Containers, SaaS and other areas of Cloud adoption and migration. Also involved in planning designs to allow enterprise level productivity using microservices and cost optimisation for the Agency.

03:15 PM - 03:30 PM

Compliance Techniques for Safe Robot Co-sharing of Space with People

To fuel pervasive use of service robotics in human spaces, safety and social compliance are necessary considerations. In this talk, we shall share our development journey to endow robots with capability to co-share space with people. We first describe our general safety provisions in conformance to the standards body. Then we shall share snippets in our technical development effort in simulations and prototyping.

Theme: Smart City: Vision to Reality

Who should attend

Smart City Policy Makers, Technical ROS audience.

Speaker(s)

Wan Kong Wah is a Senior Scientist at the Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR and currently leads the Perception group in the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Department. He has worked with local SME and public agencies on numerous AI projects, including deploying the world's first Container Number Recognition Systems at the Singapore ports and the award-winning Automated Passenger In-Car Clearance System at the checkpoint border crossing. More recently, he has led several NRP-funded grant projects focusing on hospital in-ward robotic navigation. He believes that the time is ripe for the pervasive use of robots in human society and actively contributes cost-effective technology for robots to be smarter, safer, and better able to cope with unstructured environments.

03:15 PM - 03:30 PM

How to Stay Up To Date and Where You Can Start on Your DevOps Journey

So you’re running microservices in containers? Congratulations! This is an important step towards meeting those business needs around delivering applications to the hands of your customers as soon as possible. When DevOps first made its way into many organisations, It was believed to be a Dev & Ops initiative. Sergiu will explain how the traditional expressions of CALMS (Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, and Sharing) are still relevant. How to stay up to date and where you can start on your DevOps Journey here in Singapore.

Theme: Nurturing the Tech Culture & Careers

Who should attend

DevOps enthusiasts as well as Practitioners.

Speaker(s)

As a servant technology leader with over 16 years experience, he is the organiser of DevOps meetup, and the annual conference DevOpsDays Singapore and holds a Bachelor's in Computer Science. He has worked with some of the world’s largest names in banking, technology, and other industrial era companies, advising on their digital transformation strategies.

With nearly a decade in the Asia-Pacific region, Sergiu brings an applied background in strategic planning, complex change management, process transformation, and technology enablement and helping enterprises extract business value from modern technologies and methodologies.

03:15 PM - 03:30 PM

Confidentiality & Privacy in the Cloud: Protecting Data in Use

Uncover the technology advancements that secure sensitive and regulated data while it is processed in the cloud, preventing access by cloud providers, administrator and users, and increasing data privacy and security surrounding business and consumer data. Understand how this would help deliver new insights and collaboration by enabling multiparty data analytics and machine learning that combine datasets, while keeping data private among participants. Take advantage of the broad range of confidential compute offerings Azure provides, including hardware, services, SDKs, and deployment tools, as well as confidential computing solutions architectures can be rapidly applied to various use cases across government, financial services and healthcare.

Theme: Building Digital Trust

Who should attend

Developers, Architects, Security Specialists.

Speaker(s)

Zonghe is a self-motivated, passionate and pragmatic innovator with broad experience across the public sector domain, in Singapore and abroad. He believes in working together with diverse stakeholders and industry to help transform our digital government to improve citizen well-being and business efficiencies.

His experiences in startups, product development, system integration and strategic consulting provide applicable skills and knowledge that seek to make a difference to the world we live in.

03:30 PM - 03:45 PM

Analytics By Design

All projects should be primed for success in analytics right from the start. The data collected from policy implementations, or programme execution should address questions that will help finetune refinements down the road. The data generated from products and platforms should help inform how well it is working, and what new features to build, or what to tweak. But this is often not the reality. We need to do more to reduce analytics debt. Many projects face challenges with analytics downstream, potentially leading to disappointments from both from the business side, as well as the data science practitioners. In this sharing, the speaker will share more about Analytics By Design, which is a methodology that GovTech had mooted, and is piloting internally. Detailed Write-up here: https://go.gov.sg/analytics-by-design.

Theme: Datafication

Who should attend

Executives, CDOs, CIOs, Digitalisation Officers, Transformation Officers, Product Managers, Project Managers, etc.

Speaker(s)

Joseph is the Deputy Director (Strategy & Transformation) in GovTech's Data Science and AI Division. He leads the Strategy & Transformation team that oversees the strategy planning and engagement efforts of the division. The team also runs a suite of data initiatives to transform agencies across the whole-of-government and carry out projects to spur the innovative use of data. Prior to that, Joseph was spearheading the data transformation efforts of GovTech. His interests and experience are diverse, spanning from technical work, training to programme management and leadership roles.

03:30 PM - 03:45 PM

Building Trust in Healthcare with OpenAttestation Verifiable Credentials

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the healthcare sector has rapidly expanded and has been quick on the uptake of telehealth and other innovative services. Digital identities and the need to verify the authenticity of healthcare records have never been more important in a world that requires trust and identity. Verifiable Credentials (VCs) present a robust mechanism for digital verification, in a way that's seamless, secure and transparent. We discuss a particular implementation, known as OpenAttestation VCs, and how it allows for new innovations in healthcare delivery.

Theme: Tech for Tomorrow

Who should attend

This talk is relevant for healthcare professionals spanning the clinical and policy space, Web 3.0 developers interested in the application of verifiable credentials and W3C standards, and digital identity industry leaders.

Speaker(s)

Yong Kiat currently serves as a strategic planning lead at Government Digital Services in GovTech. He oversees a team of design thinkers and software engineers in building tools and services for Singapore's grant policies.

Previously, he led public policy teams in healthcare finance policy and education planning. A quantum physicist by training, he believes in policy simulation to complement data-driven policy making.

Barry is a Deputy Director from the Government Digital Services division of Government Technology Agency. With more than 10 years in the software development industry, he currently oversees the conceptualisation and delivery of features from the development side of things, applying himself at the interface between technology and business value creation.

03:30 PM - 03:45 PM

More with LeSS – Scaling Agile at Ministry of Manpower (MOM)

Sharing on lessons learnt/experiences from scaling Agile using Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) at MOM WINS division (in-house Agile development setup).

Theme: Government Track

Who should attend

Government agencies who are looking to scale-up from small Agile/Scrum teams to a larger setup.

Speaker(s)

Kelvin is particularly interested in large-scale Agile delivery and is currently involved in the LeSS transformational initiative in WINS.

Kelvin is a Senior Delivery Manager from the Government Digital Services division in GovTech. He is currently seconded out to the Ministry Of Manpower’s WINS (Workpass INtegrated Systems) division, as part of an Ops-Tech setup with 250 personnel.

Prior to joining GovTech in 2019, Kelvin served in various capacities in the domains of project and knowledge management, across the public and private sector.

He has been invited to speak at various knowledge management conferences and has also been featured in 'The IT Society' (a publication by the Singapore Computer Society).

Kelvin is particularly interested in large-scale Agile delivery and is currently involved in the LeSS transformational initiative in WINS.

Zhixun (Will) joined GovTech’s Development Centre based at the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) in 2019. As a delivery manager with the in-house development team, he manages the continued delivery of key MOM initiatives such as myMoneySense, AccessCode, and the Workpass Integrated System.

Prior to joining GovTech, Zhixun was the lead Product Owner (PO) with the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI), and the Consumers Association of Singapore (CASE). As a PO, he worked on key e-services such as the Business Grant Portal, and also consumer facing applications such as Price Kaki (grocery price comparison app) and Fuel Kaki (petrol price comparison site).

Zhixun is passionate about product development and delivery, and has experience in multiple roles across the development team (product owner, agile coach, delivery manager, project manager). He is a strong believer that the best products are built by teams that collaborate closely across different functions, and spends his spare time working with teams to be a better version of themselves.

03:30 PM - 03:45 PM

Unlocking Engineering Productivity through Unlimited Isolated Test Environments

As cloud adoption within an organisation increases, it is only natural for engineering teams to start adopting more managed services. Over time, as the complexity of the cloud tech stack grows, it becomes increasingly hard, if not impossible, to replicate the production environment on a developer’s device or even in a shared location. At best, organisations maintain a couple of "dev" and "staging" environments that they try to keep as similar to "production" as possible. The challenge imposed by these handfuls of shared environments is that they become bottlenecks to delivery with multiple engineering teams jostling for their use. At Endowus, we went through a similar journey. Thus, in this session, we will share how we overcame this challenge by building an internal service to rapidly provide isolated "production-like" environments that enable parallel testing and deliveries by multiple engineering teams. By combining the power of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with on-demand cloud infrastructure and managed services, we will demonstrate how we manage the lifecycle of these environments exposed through self-service APIs to provide a great platform experience to our development teams. We will also cover how we are now integrating this capability with our automated testing infrastructure to further accelerate our deliveries.

Theme: Beyond Cloud

Who should attend

Product Developers, Engineers, Platform Teams (specifically in fintech/wealthtech).

Speaker(s)

Deepak Sarda is the VP of Engineering at Endowus, a leading digital wealth platform in Asia. With over 18 years of experience in delivering greenfield software products in complex domains, Deepak is responsible for leading and growing Endowus’ high-performing agile software engineering team. Prior to Endowus, Deepak was the Head of Developer Solutions Architecture for ASEAN at Amazon Web Services (AWS). He had also spent more than a decade in the financial services industry, including at JPMorgan Chase & Co.

03:45 PM - 04:00 PM

Develop Resilient Applications for Lean Operations

In an increasingly manpower-lean operating environment, it is essential to design and develop applications that are resilient and minimise manpower efforts to monitor and mediate service interruptions.

Application requirements have changed and escalated drastically over the past decade and more so with the advent of cloud. A fail-safe app development will need to employ techniques and methodology from multiple disciplines.

For example, there is a plethora of different frameworks and approaches to building resilient applications:
1. System Reliability Engineering (SRE). This seeks to take a data-driven approach, with feedback for continuous improvement decisions.
2. DevSecOps with SHIP-HATS. This seeks to have a holistic approach to chain the activities from development, security to operations so that there are no gaps left behind to achieve a quality system that is ‘fail-safe’ to security vulnerability.
3. Architecture approaches such as Reactive architecture seek to be responsive, elastic, resilient, and message-driven.
4. Build compliant and cost-effective solutions by moving up skill levels in cloud adoption maturity with Containerisation, serverless solutions to minimise maintenance overheads, and IaC for automation maximisation.
5. Importantly, how do we align to WOG-level SGTS services, and direction including authentication – WOG AD/AAD/CAM, GTBA.
6. And, there is of course what I would call ‘common sense’ – foundations of computer science that are irrespective of the technologies that will be employed to build resilience of systems; such as the handling distributed transactions, respecting what constitute global state.

In this talk, we seek to un-tangle the different approaches, which are all correct because they come from different stakeholder’s perspective. But how do we tie them together? What are the practical practice-able things that can be done to achieve ‘Fail-safe application development’? This is what this talk will share and will be interesting to seek feedback from practitioners from the audience in the session.

Theme: Fail-Safe App Development

Who should attend

Architect, Developers.

Speaker(s)

Pow Hwee has been with GovTech for 4 years. He led the first wave for cloud migration for government systems to GCC and has been supporting cloud migration journeys of various applications. He is also involved in large scale system development projects in GovTech. Prior to GovTech, Pow Hwee worked primarily in FSI domain with banks in consulting and SI environments, in roles as architect for major development projects.

03:45 PM - 04:00 PM

Do Robots Need Legs?

Legged robots are ubiquitous in today's pop culture and are often depicted as having extraordinary capabilities in viral videos. However, adopting them for use in the real world is not as simple. We will share the considerations behind fielding legged robots, and why they are particularly useful in rugged environments.

Theme: Tech for Tomorrow

Who should attend

Roboticists, System Integrators, Developers.

Speaker(s)

Yong Jian is a Senior Engineer at the Defence Science & Technology Agency of Singapore (DSTA). He works at the intersection of mechnical engineering and computer science to develop robotic systems for the real world.

03:45 PM - 04:00 PM

The Non-Existent Playbook to Designing for the Future in Government

Come and hear from us on our ups and downs in attempting to shape designs of digital services and products while battling red tape, naysayers and pushing the designs to be future-ready.

Theme: Government Track

Who should attend

Fellow public officers who have roles dealing with innovation, technology, design and are well-aware (or want to hear about) the challenges and lessons learnt in trying to overcome them.

Speaker(s)

Leon is a designer at the Experience Strategy and Design team (ESD) in the ACE clan, GovTech. The ESD team has been working in several projects at the nexus of design x technology x digital services. Besides GovTech, Leon has close to 15 years of public service experience, in both policy and innovation work. He has worked at MCYS, PSD and a short stint in Fintech, before landing at GovTech in 2019.

03:45 PM - 04:00 PM

Managing Infrastructure-as-Code: Common Mistakes in Terraform When Starting Out

More developers are using Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools than ever to manage and deploy their resources onto the cloud. While IaC provides a huge array of benefits, there are other longer term considerations that developers should take note of when making use of it to deploy their applications. This session covers some of the mistakes that are commonly made by developers that are just starting out with Terraform, as well as some opinions on what might be better practices for developers who have used Terraform for awhile.

Theme: Fail-Safe App Development

Who should attend

Beginner/Intermediate. All that are interested in the use of Infrastructure-as-Code as a means of managing resources on the Cloud.

Speaker(s)

Darryl is a DevOps Engineer with GovTech. In his current role with the Engineering Productivity team of the Government Digital Services, he tinkers with tools and solutions to improve the reliability, efficiency, and speed of product development. He currently works on Container Stack, a Whole-of-Government container hosting platform, as well as GCC 2.0.

* Please note that the programme may be subject to change without prior notice


Wednesday (16/11/22)

02:00 PM - 02:15 PM

Know and Measure DevSecOps Best Practices

SHIP-HATS is a continuous integration/continuous delivery component within the Singapore Government Tech Stack, we ensure security and governance guardrails to enable developers to run end to end pipelines, and deliver secure and quality code. With SHIP-HATS 2.0 latest multi-tenanted Gitlab SaaS platform, we provide development tools and environment setup in compliance with AIAS and IM8 policy standards for the whole of government.

Join us as we share what DevSecOps is and how it can be applied on SHIP-HATS 2.0 to help developers automate the entire DevOps lifecycle. Understand how we can achieve pipeline governance and security with the compliance framework, observability and build-in security features. We will also be showcasing a bonus demonstration on how we can leverage Gitlab features to gamify the DevSecOps experience.

Theme: Fail-Safe App Development

Who should attend

Government Officers, Software Engineers, DevOps Engineers, Security Engineers, Project Managers.

Speaker(s)

Software Engineer for SHIP, worked on the enablement of SHIP's devops toolchain and the development of data visualisation pipeline to drive devsecops adoption.

02:00 PM - 02:15 PM

DevSecOps Driven Workload to Workload Zero Trust to Detect Advanced Threats

MITRE ATT&CK framework offers a taxonomy that can be used to describe any attack. This is very useful as we discuss the structure of an advanced attack that has multiple stages and is executed over time as a succession of achievement of tactical goals. In our research we notice that adoption of Zero Trust principles (assume breach, explicitly verify, use least privilege, continually assess), orchestrated by DevSecOps, the chances of detecting execution of procedures that employ techniques for carrying out a tactical goal, increase significantly. A study of tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) carried out by use of Sunburst, a malware that was employed in the Solarigate attacks, shows that the most relevant zero trust principles whose adoption would help in detecting the TTPs are ‘assume breach’ and ‘continually assess’. Signals generated by activities of threat modeling, SAST, DAST, Pen Testing and additional techniques to observe process level characteristics and communication profiles of workloads during the development phase of the software development lifecycle, allow development of a baseline against which anomalies can be detected via continuous monitoring in runtime during the operational phase of the cycle. Machine Learning assisted contextual analysis of anomalies help identify TTPs and generate a risk score which is used to take an appropriate mitigation action. In our talk we discuss practical ways for leveraging DevSecOps to follow zero trust principles of ‘assume breach’ and ‘continually assess’, in order to detect TTPs thwarting hackers' attempts to reach their tactical goals.

Theme: Building Digital Trust

Who should attend

Developers, Security Professionals and Site Reliability Engineers.

Speaker(s)

Mudit Tyagi is a Senior Director in the office of the CTO and focuses on security of modern applications. He has 20 years of experience in Software Engineering and System Architecture design for delivery of secure applications for Financial and HealthCare services. In his current role, Mudit studies security implications related to use of Cloud and Open-Source Technologies and modern API based application architectures utilising microservices. He works with industry thought leaders to develop strategies for delivering secure applications. Prior to F5, Mudit was the Founder and CEO of Confiserve, a secure application development firm focused on Financial Services and HealthCare. Mudit was also an early employee at various Networking and Security startup companies including Rapid City(BayNetworks), Nevis Networks(Qualys), Damballa Networks(Core Security), Inkra Networks(Cisco). He has Bachelor's degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering from Columbia University and a Masters in Computer Engineering from University of New Mexico.

02:00 PM - 02:15 PM

Building Blocks of a Successful Digital Transformation with Datafication

Almost every organisation is going through a rapid digital transformation to serve its customers and stakeholders, while creating efficiencies and cost savings in response to the macro economic environment. A successful digital transformation needs an effective data transformation and data culture to make sense of all the new data being generated. In this session, we will cover what the building blocks of an effective data transformation are that the most successful Fortune 500 companies use across various layers of data infrastructure, tools, people and process.

Theme: Datafication

Who should attend

This session is for those who work with data and are responsible for any of these functions:
- Strategy & Planning / Innovation
- Data Management
- Data Science & Artificial Intelligence
- Analytics / Business Intelligence / Research & Analysis
- Digital Transformation / Citizen Experience & Engagement / Community Building
- Information Technology
- Data Architecture / Data Governance / Data Security
- Operations (including Finance, Internal Audit, Human Resources, Capability Development, Procurement, Marketing, Services)

Speaker(s)

Seth Cheong is a key member of the Tableau Southeast Asia team, and is responsible for driving customer success in adopting data culture, unlocking value from use cases and data assets, and scaling up employees’ analytics proficiency. With over two decades of experience in data management, BI reporting, web analytics, and building and managing analytics teams, he has always enjoyed supporting and partnering senior management and functions such as Finance, HR, Customer Services, Sales and Marketing, and Operations in organisations to transform through technology.

02:00 PM - 02:15 PM

Security Suite for Engineering Endpoint Devices (SEED) - Featuring TechPass and DEEP

This lightning talk covers what is the SEED suite and how it secures access to GCC 2.0 and SGTS applications. We will also cover the underlying principle of User Focused Security and the enhancements and developments to the SEED suite components over the past year.

Theme: Government Track

Who should attend

General Public and Vendors who are interested in the TechPass Identity platform and our GCC 2.0 Zero Trust Networking, MDM and EDR solutions.

Speaker(s)

Samuel is a Senior DevOps Engineer at GovTech. In his 7 years with GovTech, he participated in the design and implementation of Singapore Government Tech Stack Service. He is currently a member of the Cloud Engineering Team, a cross-divisional team working to improve GCC and advocate cloud native solutions and DevOps practices in the Singapore Government. As a polyglot programmer, he dabbles in a wide range of technologies.

At GovTech, Govind has been involved in implementing various solutions to secure cloud infrastructure, as well as advocating for better endpoint security posture.

This includes integrating DevSecOps practices into development on the Cloud, and ensuring that these additions improve the overall developer experience.

As one of the pioneering developers working on SEED, Govind is committed to making the development experience across the government a safe and enjoyable one.

02:15 PM - 02:30 PM

Runtime in No Time!

As the world comes out of the pandemic, governments and businesses have been put under great pressure to digitally transform their operations. With this high on the agenda, how can we best leverage the cloud and get ourselves from zero to running in the shortest time? This lightning talk will speak about the challenges and solutions to deliver running applications fast in public sector. Get ready, get set, get stacked up!

Theme: Fail-Safe App Development

Who should attend

Project Managers, Product Managers, DevOps Engineers, Software Engineers, Solution Architects, Application Developers.

Speaker(s)

Alex is a product manager at GovTech and he oversees product development for SGTS Runtime.

Before joining GovTech, he launched a data platform at a global travel retailer while leading middleware development and API management initiatives.

In his free time, he enjoys movies at home with his family and spending time with his growing 3 year old boy. He loves sharing about technology while learning from others in the field.

02:15 PM - 02:30 PM

Building a Distributed Data Mesh with a DevOps Approach

Applications have moved from being traditional monoliths to microservice services driven architecture. Similarly, data platforms are facing that transitional moment and the advent of a distributed data mesh is the data platform or microservices. Originated from Zhamak Dehghani, a ThoughtWorks consultant, a distributed data mesh is a platform architecture that supports distributed, data-specific domains and serves "data-as-a-product" owned and managed by different domain owners. This in turn enables data sharing between different domains across an organization with more feasibility and flexibility.

To build a distributed data mesh, similar to how we build microservices, good DevOps practices must be in place in order to help iterate through changes and deploy updates quickly. For example, how do we efficiently deploy our data code? How do we manage different data environments across domains? Is it possible to create reproducible pipelines and infrastructure through an automated fashion?

We will look at how
a) using a data platform such as Snowflake extends a Data Mesh approach by enabling domains to not only share data as product but also processing logic as product.
b) we embed DevOps tools (such as Jenkin, Terraform) and open source transformation tools (such as DBT and Apache Airflow) to build elastic data pipelines, repeatable infrastructure and scalable data products.
c) governance is enforced within each domain and propagated downstream.

Theme: Datafication

Who should attend

Data Engineers, Data Architects, DevOps, Data Ops, Cloud Architects.

Speaker(s)

Adrian is a Senior Sales Engineer based in Singapore working on Enterprise Financial Services customers as well as various digital natives around ASEAN.

He diligently works with customers to ensure that they see success in Snowflake from the initial architecture and design all the way to their go-live.

Adrian likes to combine DevOps practices with data and has created multiple technical collaterals integrating DevOps tooling and practices with Snowflake. He has spoken at the following events:
- Snowflake Summit 2022 for Snowpark for Data Engineering with Java and Scala.
- VMware 2019 Partner Forum Summit on Kubernetes.

02:15 PM - 02:30 PM

The Singapore Government Developer Console: The Next Evolution for Accelerating WOG Digital Transformation

As agencies adopt more digital services as part of their digital transformation efforts, it has become increasingly challenging to discover, onboard and manage the different services separately.

In this session, find out how different teams managing product discoverability, IAM, business and design, have come together to unify the user experience for the different digital services and what its future entails not just for agencies, but participating services as well.

Theme: Government Track

Who should attend

Public Officers, Business Partners and Tech Communities involved in digital transformation.

Speaker(s)

Damien is a Senior Delivery Manager at GovTech, focusing on TechPass and TechBiz to improve the experience of developers using the Singapore Government Tech Stack. His responsibilities include working on upcoming product deliverables and liaising with the various stakeholders. In his free time, he enjoys playing sports and gaining new experiences.

Cheng Yong is a Senior Software Engineer at GovTech. He leads a team of software engineers with product mindset in Singapore Government Developer Portal, focusing on discoverability and accessibility of Whole-of-Government digital services.

Prior to joining GovTech, he had experience in creating frameworks and tools for engineers - whether it is design system for better collaboration between designers and engineers, or building reusable services for different product teams.

02:15 PM - 02:30 PM

How the ScamShield Product Suite is Fighting Scams in Singapore

As the millions of dollars lost to scams continue to increase in Singapore, it has become clear that fighting scams is a national issue. To tackle this, a team at Open Government Products (OGP) has built an ecosystem of products to help members of public and government authorities in Singapore to check, report, and block scam messages and calls. During this talk, learn more about how the ScamShield team at OGP is leveraging the power of the community to identify and block scammers while simplifying the workload for police officers in their fight against scams, and how they are continuing to evolve their strategy towards a more holistic approach.

Theme: Building Digital Trust

Who should attend

Product Managers, Designers, Developers, Policy, Anyone interested in the fight against scams.

Speaker(s)

Passionate about discovering and developing solutions to serve stigmatised and underserved communities.

02:30 PM - 02:45 PM

Data Driven IT Operations & Benefits

Management insights through real-time dashboards for better visibility into events and metrics.

Measure operations performance for better problem resolution and operations improvement.

Theme: Government Track

Who should attend

IT Leaders, Application & Infras Operations team.

Speaker(s)

20+ Years of experience in IT Operations, Engineering & Architecture in FSI.

Experience with implementing and maintaining DevSecOps & SRE practices.

02:30 PM - 02:45 PM

How We Soup Up Robots

Why be satisfied with plain vanilla robots when you can soup them up? We discuss the various ways to enhance a robot's abilities through the integration of novel payloads, and the integration considerations that we need to look out for.

Theme: Tech for Tomorrow

Who should attend

Roboticists, System Integrators, Developers.

Speaker(s)

Yong Jian is a Senior Engineer at the Defence Science & Technology Agency of Singapore (DSTA). He works at the intersection of mechanical engineering and computer science to develop robotic systems for the real world.

02:30 PM - 02:45 PM

Why You Can't Ignore Observability Anymore in the Public Sector?

Observability aka o11y (a term derived from Control Theory) encourages developers to create software that pushes out traces and logs, that captures the performance and app behaviour right from development to production. This session shares the benefits and how public sector developers can leverage the Singapore Government Tech Stack to improve observability.

Theme: Fail-Safe App Development

Who should attend

Engineers, PMs, CIOs.

Speaker(s)

Paul is a product manager taking care of StackOps, the monitoring component of the Singapore Government Tech Stack (SGTS).

Before joining GovTech, Paul spent a decade in an automotive software firm—starting his career there as a software engineer. He later switched roles to transform traditional monolithic platforms to service-oriented architecture and drive agile adoption for global teams. During his free time, Paul might be seen riding up north across the causeway on his motorbike.

02:30 PM - 02:45 PM

Big Data Solution for MRT Platform Crowd Analysis

The contribution of this talk is two-fold:
1) Create a real time dashboard to monitor train platform crowd status.
2) Create a classification model to predict the crowd level of each MRT station.

The multi-classification model is trained using random forest and SMOTE (Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique). We use various types of data including train station information, weather information and train platform crowd levels collected from different data providers such as LTA, NEA and OneMap to monitor MRT platform crowd level in real-time. The monitor system is built on top of a big data framework. Big data ecosystem is established as follows:
1) Apache Flume and Kafka are used to ingest real time data.
2) Spark Streaming reads and processes the streaming data from Kafka and write the processed data into HBase.
3) Spark SQL and Hive are used to transfer data from HBase to MySQL.
4) Tableau is used to create real time dashboard to monitor and visualise MRT platform crowd status.

Theme: Smart City: Vision to Reality

Who should attend

Data analysts and Data Engineers, who want to gain skills to handle large amounts of data in public transport area.

Speaker(s)

Liu Fan is a lecturer in the Software Systems Practice, specializing in software engineering, big data engineering and data analytics. She received her Ph.D. degree from School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Prior to joining ISS, she was a lecturer at the School of Informatics & IT, Temasek Polytechnic. She has also worked at GovTech as a Data Scientist, handling Big Data Analytics for the Smart Nation Sensor Platform. Her research interests are in big data analytics, fuzzy neural networks and machine learning.

02:45 PM - 03:00 PM

Integration of Apache Iceberg Into Cloudera’s CDP Platform

A short talk on what Apache Iceberg is, how Cloudera integrated it into our platform and a showcase of main Iceberg features like query time travel, partition evolution and automated table maintenance.

Theme: Tech for Tomorrow

Who should attend

Perfect presentation for people curious about modern data platforms based on open data formats. Low to medium tech level, the presentation will have some high-level SQL and Spark statement examples.

Speaker(s)

With almost 20 years in IT, Daniel is still as curious about new technologies as at the beginning of his career. With a long history of designing and implementing enterprise solutions, Daniel is currently helping customers to successfully start using Cloudera's hybrid data platform.

02:45 PM - 03:00 PM

Eat a Peach, Build a Team!

What is the secret sauce behind high performing engineering teams? Countless books and podcasts have tackled the topic, but the answer is highly subjective and hence remains elusive.

Inspiration usually strikes in the unlikeliest of places. David Chang's memoir - Eat a Peach, is a chronicle of his life as an entrepreneur, restaurateur, chef and media personality. This book was a very inspiring and entertaining read. But, more importantly, it made clear the core principles for building high performing teams, irrespective of whether it's a team of chefs and cooks plating up delicious food meal after meal or a team of engineers deploying code to production every day.

Culture is a hard thing to get right since it's never as simple as following a prescribed set of steps to get the desired result. However, there are some core tenets that are non-negotiable to building high performing engineering teams.

In this talk, I will cover the fundamental principles essential to setting up and nurturing efficient teams, inspired by the book as well as based on my experiences in working with high performing teams in the last few years. There'll be plenty of examples from the world of restaurants and software engineering alike!

Theme: Nurturing the Tech Culture & Careers

Who should attend

Tech Leads, Team Leads, Engineering Managers - all engineering leaders looking to improve or scale their team's culture. Developers, Product Managers, Quality Analysts, Business Analysts, Designers - in short anyone who's part of any cross functional agile team.

Speaker(s)

Archanaa is the Head of Engineering at Autumn Life, Singapore. She has worked in a variety of domains including retail, education, micro-finance, travel and IoT in the last 13 years as an engineer and tech lead. She has experience in facilitating product design, architecting applications, leading teams to deliver solutions and coaching individuals & teams. She has worked across different technologies like .Net, Java, RoR, Golang and Clojure. She is an avid reader, a board game geek and a coffee addict.

02:45 PM - 03:00 PM

Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD in Practice with AWS CDK

DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools to increase development velocity to deliver apps. In general, practicing DevOps enables organisations to better serve customers and compete effectively in the market. Infrastructure as Code and release pipelines with CI/CD are two of best practices in DevOps, and considered the best entry for developers who just getting started with DevOps. Join us in this session to understand how we can implement IaC and CI/CD using AWS Cloud Development Kit. We will show you a step-by-step demo to help you get started. After this session, you will understand the overall concept of IaC and CI/CD, AWS services you need to use and developer tools for seamless integration with your development workflow.

Theme: Fail-Safe App Development

Who should attend

Developers, Ops, SysOps, Head of IT.

Speaker(s)

Donnie Prakoso is a software engineer, self-proclaimed barista, café racer enthusiast, and Senior Developer Advocate at AWS covering ASEAN and AEM, and based in Singapore. With more than 17 years of experience in the technology industry, from telecommunications, banking to startups. He's now focusing on helping the developers to understand varieties of technology to transform their ideas into execution. He loves coffee and any discussion of any topics from microservices to AI / ML.

02:45 PM - 03:00 PM

SmartGym - Personalised Fitness Goal Setting

SmartGym is a holistic health and fitness data platform that provides users with fitness insights measured through a series of connected sensors built into gym equipment and health metric measurements. These sensors are currently installed on three types of gym equipment:
1) weight stack machines;
2) treadmills; and
3) weighing machines.

SmartGym equipment is currently deployed in three community gyms across Singapore – Our Tampines Hub, Jurong East and Heartbeat @ Bedok. Personalised Fitness Goal Setting builds on health and fitness data to personalise the recommended workout intensity to the needs of each individual. The users are guided through their workout sessions to achieve their health and fitness goals.

Theme: Smart City: Vision to Reality

Who should attend

General Public, Developers, Sensor Providers, Facility Managers, Event/Program Planners, Public Officers, Fitness Coaches, Healthcare Workers, Caregivers.

Speaker(s)

Caleb graduated from Singapore University of Technology and Design with a degree in Computer Science. He specialises in Artificial Intelligence and web development. Caleb is highly curious about most things and is passionate about connecting the dots across different disciplines.

03:00 PM - 03:15 PM

CRM Integration to SaaS CICD

DevOps has reaped great benefits on project delivery and delivered much business value to users, and this session demystifies and showcases how we can run ShipHat 2.0 on SaaS.

Theme: Tech for Tomorrow

Who should attend

Developers, Government Officers, SaaS Vendors.

Speaker(s)

Alex Lew is a certified Salesforce Application Architect and System Architect, who runs advisory services and Salesforce implementations for government and corporate clients

03:00 PM - 03:15 PM

Cloud Native or Cloud Naïve?

IRAS has embarked on our cloud native journey, building our core system with predominantly PaaS and SaaS components.

This has helped us move towards:
- shortening the turnaround time to setup systems in the cloud.
- improving availability, maintainability and scalability.
- achieving zero downtime.

However, there were also lessons learnt regarding:
- how infallible are PaaS and SaaS services.
- scaling limits of cloud components.
- etc.

IRAS will share on what we have learnt from our cloud native journey thus far - i.e. things we wish we knew before we embarked on our journey.

Theme: Beyond Cloud

Who should attend

Those interested in learning about the benefits of leveraging on PaaS and SaaS to transition to the cloud.

Speaker(s)

Peter leads the team for infrastructure and security in the architecture office for IRAS.

03:00 PM - 03:15 PM

GovTech Projects - A General Recipe

Sharing the experiences of setting up projects like GCC 2.0 and SEED, with the need for many different roles for a project to succeed. This talk covers some of the critical common engineering and non-engineering roles that were instrumental during our journey implementing GCC 2.0 and SEED. This session intends to share possible specialties for those who are new to government projects, and hopefully inspires interest for more talents to join us in our journey in designing our imagined futures.

Theme: Nurturing the Tech Culture & Careers

Who should attend

General Public and Vendors who are interested in how Government Projects are run.

Speaker(s)

Samuel is a Senior DevOps Engineer at GovTech. In his 7 years with GovTech, he participated in the design and implementation of Singapore Government Tech Stack Service. He is currently a member of the Cloud Engineering Team, a cross-divisional team working to improve GCC and advocate cloud native solutions and DevOps practices in the Singapore Government. As a polyglot programmer, he dabbles in a wide range of technologies.

Lay Hian is a Senior Infrastructure Architect at Govtech. With 15 years of experience in the government sector, she has supported the design and delivery of several key network and cloud infrastructure implementation. Currently also a member of the Cloud Engineering Team, she contributes to the enhancement of GCC and GPC in the areas of Identity, Access and Managed Services.

03:00 PM - 03:15 PM

High Fidelity Deployment of MicroServices

In this talk, Samantha will share how her team employs a mix of Environment Branching, Canary and Blue-Green Deployment strategies to achieve a lower cortisol deployment experience.

Theme: Fail-Safe App Development

Who should attend

Folks interested in discussing and implementing low-stress deployments.

Speaker(s)

Samantha leads a work stream in GoBusiness. She is occupationally invested in fuss-free cross-environment deployments.

03:15 PM - 03:30 PM

Guarding the Keys to your Kingdom : A Pragmatic Approach to Zero Trust within Public and Private Clouds

As we start increasing adoption of the cloud to unlock infrastructure elasticity and modernize application architectures for scale, this is transforming how your security boundaries are defined and controlled. Changing boundaries require changing approaches in how we secure critical systems and data sources from attackers.

In this session, we will talk about how HashiCorp Vault allows you to achieve a dynamic security posture that is intended to help thwart both external and internal hostile actors. We will also review Vault’s architecture and how it is able to scale to handle trillions of transactions a year.

Theme: Building Digital Trust

Who should attend

Cybersecurity, Security Architects, CISOs, Solution Architects.

Speaker(s)

Johnny Fang is a Senior Solutions Engineer for Public Sector at HashiCorp and is based out of Singapore. With over 25 years of consulting experience in various platforms and technologies, he has been an architect on a number of large scale Enterprise projects. Prior to HashiCorp, he was a lead cloud architect at AWS running various infra automation projects for large scale migrations and cloud landing zones. In his current role, Johnny enjoys working with various enterprise customers to derive the maximum value from the HashiCorp technology stack.

03:15 PM - 03:30 PM

The 10-minute Guide to Running an API Program

APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, are like doors that provide access to information and functionality to other systems but they are more than just backend technical implementation. APIs are products for developers that build today’s customer experience and mechanism through which value is increasingly exchanged in digital economies. Within the government, APIs are key in facilitating data exchange, opening up collaboration and innovation across different teams and agencies. Externally, they are enabling our digital economy and driving efficiency for businesses. To realise the value of APIs as accelerators, it is important to adopt an API as a Product mindset – to design and deliver APIs with full lifecycles and long term roadmaps that continue to provide strategic value.

Theme: Government Track

Who should attend

Agencies Product Leads who are charged with digitalisation / transformation initiatives.

Speaker(s)

Zen Chua is a Lead Product Manager leading the SGTS’ APIs & Communications family of products at GovTech. As a formal engineering manager and software engineer developing applications across different industries such as banking, finance, travel, hospitality, he is passionate about the intersection between technology and business. He is now supporting government agencies in realising their digital transformation, formulating their API strategy, opening up collaboration and innovation within the government and with external businesses. In his free time, he enjoys cycling and taking strolls with his 2 sons in the parks.

03:15 PM - 03:30 PM

Automating Cloud FinOps : Real Life Experiences from Large Scale Cloud Operations Across Organisations

Cloud FinOps involves "cloud financial management discipline and cultural practices that enable organisations to get maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, technology and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions". Forward-thinking organisations are adopting new cost optimisation techniques that move beyond the traditional to a more automated, intelligent approach that delivers better business outcomes.

In this talk, we will share how we automated the Cloud FinOps across organisations and share real life experiences from large scale cloud operations:
- How to make costs visible and relate them to business needs.
- How to reduce cloud costs while optimising application performance.
- How to leverage automation to save money and reduce time spent managing your cloud spend.
- How to establish a proactive culture around cloud cost monitoring, management, and optimisation.
- How to leverage cloud cost intelligence to make more informed business decisions.
- How to develop benchmarks for cloud forecasting and "Shift-Left" practices on Cloud FinOps.
- How to implement Cloud FinOps maturity assessment.

Theme: Beyond Cloud

Who should attend

Cloud Architects, Cloud Application Managers, Cloud Developers.

Speaker(s)

Dr Sakthivel heads the SAO in GovTech and drives GovTech-managed agencies' application architecture strategy, systems development, and manages the solution architect team. He also drives the Government Commercial Cloud adoption programme by providing cloud application consultancy to agencies to migrate their systems to the cloud. Dr. Sakthivel has more than 25 years of industry experience in architecting, designing and developing large-scale application systems.

03:15 PM - 03:30 PM

Design Thinking in DevOps

Let’s automate everything! Sounds familiar? Automation is indeed the fundamental of DevOps to improve software delivery performance across the build, test and deployment stages. However, automation is a double-edged sword, without a proper planning and a well-defined process, the results can be disastrous or there can be no result at all. Developing automation in DevOps is not as straightforward as saying "let’s automate everything" because it may involve different tools and processes for different stages. Although we very much hope that these tools are plug-and-play, there is no one-size-fits-all process so we need a team, typically DevOps/SRE engineers, to develop tool-specific scripts. Why is it so challenging to automate everything despite a strong push for automation in DevOps? Automation development is similar to product development in some ways. Although the goal is to improve software delivery performance, the main beneficiaries are the developers and operations team because it offloads them from repetitive and mundane tasks. So whether the automation eventually gets implemented in production, it really depends on them. If the automation is not going to help them in any ways, you’ll see all your efforts in the bin. Or, if they’re asking for something not realistic, it’s not going to benefit anyone as well so sometimes it’s not because of the technology but the human element that’s hindering the automation development. This is where Design Thinking comes into play. You’ll learn the practical adoption of Design Thinking and how we use it to approach automation development. By the end of the session, we can all call ourselves Automation Designers (if you pay attention and grasp the concept well).

Theme: Fail-Safe App Development

Who should attend

Anyone who handles software development such as DevOps/SRE Engineers, Developers, Scrum Masters etc.

Speaker(s)

As an alumnus of the Design Centric Program in NUS, Design Thinking has become "muscle memory" in my daily life. Started my career as a cloud operations engineer in Singtel, where I experienced the challenges of managing a cloud infrastructure for mission critical workloads. To address the pain points, I have implemented the DevOps methodology driven by automation and observability to streamline the cloud infrastructure operations.

On my quest to better understand cloud adoption beyond the Telco industry, I moved on to GovTech where I was tasked to manage the GPC services and provide advice to the GPC tenants on Cloud Native and DevOps adoption. In order for me to gain exposure to broader spectrum of DevOps adoption and to address pain points of larger developer communities, I decided to join Oracle as a DevOps Senior Solution Specialist to consult enterprise of all sizes in multiple industries in Asia Pacific region.

As a practitioner of Design Thinking, I strongly believe that users should be the focal point of any solutions. This is how I address any requirements to make developers' lives better.

03:30 PM - 03:45 PM

Enabling Data Sharing Ecosystems

SGDex (Singapore Data Exchange), an initiative by GovTech, is a public digital infrastructure hosted on the Government on Commercial Cloud (GCC). SGDex provides a flexible data exchange layer for trusted and seamless multilateral consent-based data sharing between government agencies and private sector organisations. SGDex enables faster development of scalable, secure and resilient sector-level data applications which can leverage standardised data exchange components. As the economy’s pace of digitalisation accelerates, businesses will need to exchange data in a secure manner with each other and the Government to unlock new opportunities. A proper combination of technologies and public-private collaboration is needed to build scalable and secure platforms that perform standards-based data exchanges, and support the automation of the data flow and interoperability between platforms. SGDex currently supports data platforms in the financial services and supply chain sectors, Singapore Financial Data Exchange (SGFinDex) and Singapore Trade Data Exchange (SGTraDex) respectively.

Theme: Building Digital Trust

Who should attend

We welcome data and tech professionals such as Agency and Industry CIOs and IT Directors, Project Managers, Business Analysts, Developers and Solution Architects who with data transformation projects to join us and learn more about how SGDex can work as a catalyst for your needs.

Speaker(s)

Daryl Low is Assistant Director of Trusted Data & Services at the Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech). In this position, he oversees product management of national digital identity’s (NDI) Singapore Data Exchange (SGDex) with the aim of enabling seamless data exchanges between government and private institutions. Before joining the public service in 2020, Daryl was a technology entrepreneur with a keen focus on communications, engagement and relationships – with inventions ranging from hardware-driven customer relationship management systems to talent acquisition and screening technologies.

03:30 PM - 03:45 PM

Breaking Down Video Silos with CVX

With the prevalence of high-resolution cameras to enable operations work, organisations are able to derive more insights from video content – from simple detection and alerts, to complex intelligence about behaviours and events. Over time, agencies may implement video systems from different sources that inevitably hamper video access, video sharing and insights generation. In GovTech, we intend to address this problem via Cloud Video Exchange (CVX). We will share our approach for using CVX to empower Government agencies to unify their video systems on a single cloud platform, increasing collaboration and productivity. Together with industry partners, we seek to democratise video content and sharing of insights within and across organisations.

Theme: Datafication

Who should attend

Business/ Operations Leads, Product Managers or Developers interested in video systems or video sharing.

Speaker(s)

Suresh is a Product Manager with the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Division (DSAID) in GovTech. He is passionate about helping organisations reimagine their products with technology to drive meaningful change. Prior to GovTech, Suresh was with Singapore Airlines working on digital innovation and venture building in aviation and travel.

03:30 PM - 03:45 PM

The CISO Ecosystem in Government

Senior executives in companies need to move away from the belief that cybersecurity issues are relevant only to the IT team. In a world where cybersecurity issues are getting increasingly complex and challenging, this calls for strong leadership right from the top in fostering the security culture of the entire organisation. This presentation looks at the role that Chief Information Security Officers (CISO) play in shaping the security culture in organisations and ensuring security issues are addressed at the right organisational level. Presenter will share on the setup of the community of CISOs across the whole of government and how this network of CISOs forms a core fabric in the Government's cyber defence.

Theme: Government Track

Who should attend

Chief Information Security Officer, Chief Information Officer, Director of Security, IT Director/Manager, Security Systems Engineer, Security Analyst, Security Manager, Security Auditor, Security Architect, Security Consultant, Network Architect.

Speaker(s)

Derek Gooh is the Director of the Government CISO Office where he oversees several Whole of Government (WOG) cybersecurity programmes including the Cyber Maturity and Capability Development programme, WOG Cybersecurity Scorecard as well as Competency development of the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) profession. Derek is also the Head of the Ministry CISOs overseeing the team of MCISOs seconded to the Ministries, who in turn coordinate and lead the Agency CISOs within the Ministry Family. As Head of the CISOs community, Derek leads the community and engages them through the regular forums and channels established for the community to gain insights to the latest cybersecurity developments and learn best practices from one another.

03:30 PM - 03:45 PM

{{I2C}} – An Infra to Code ToolKit

{{I2C}} which, represents Infrastructure-to-Code, is a toolkit developed by the Government Infrastructure Group to enable Agencies to quickly provision cloud resources in a consistent and repeatable manner with minimum effort. It embodies automation best practices to codify existing environments thus supporting use cases such as configuration backup, rapid duplication and recovery of systems, effortless setup of one environment from another – for example setting up a new production environment from an existing UAT environment. Join us to learn more about how {{I2C}} can help you save time and effort while eliminating human error when managing systems and multiple environments in the cloud.

Theme: Beyond Cloud

Who should attend

DevOps Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer, Cloud Administrator.

Speaker(s)

Nicolas is a member of the Managed Hosting Infrastructure team where he champions the modernisation of infrastructure provisioning through the use of code.

Bringing with him more than 15 years experience in ICT, Nicolas specialises in pulling together Cloud Infrastructure, software defined data centre, containerisation and DevOps technologies to improve the deployment and operations of systems in the cloud through automation.

03:45 PM - 04:00 PM

Building a Robust Threat Detection System for Social Engineered Cyber Threats

In 2021, cyber criminals impersonating OCBC Bank through text messages successfully scammed hundreds of Singaporeans of their life savings. In May ‘22, the FBI reported up to $43 billion dollars of business losses to cyber criminals due to similar social engineered attacks between 2016 and 2021. Instead of a spray and pray method where the same attack is sent to multiple users, cyber criminals are now pivoting to highly targeted social engineered attacks. They attempt to gain your trust by impersonating someone you already know or trust - your manager, your colleagues etc. They then aim to trick you into executing the cyber attack, be it running malware, providing your credentials or sending money to a fake bank account. However, legacy security solutions that have defended us against cyber threats are built on brittle rules and threat intelligence feeds - this lends them to perform poorly against these zero day, hyper targeted attacks. In order to solve these emerging threats, one would need a completely new approach - we propose that a behavioral detection engine with modern ML techniques would deliver a solution with both higher recall and precision. In place of building lists of "known bad" entities, we propose first building profiles of what is considered normal within user environments. Machine Learning models trained to detect deviations against this baseline understanding of normality are then capable of differentiating attacker vs safe user behavior with a higher level of accuracy. I am a founding engineer at Abnormal Security, a next-gen Email Security startup. I’ve spent the last four years building this behavioral detection engine that aims to detect all types of malicious emails, especially socially engineered email attacks (e.g. sending a Fake Invoice while impersonating a Vendor). In my proposed talk, I will discuss the unique parameters of modern cybersecurity attacks in relation to machine learning, particularly the adversarial nature of the problem and how it shows up in data and model performance. Using the email security problem as an example, I will then discuss the requirements of a robust threat detection system, describing how both ML and software systems are required to solve cyberthreats in different time horizons. I will then focus on our machine learning stack, discussing how we incorporate the behavioral detection approach with our feature aggregation engine, the various components of ML solution and their various results.

Theme: Building Digital Trust

Who should attend

Software engineers, ML Engineers, Cyber Security Professionals, Anyone interested in the Content Moderation/Abuse space.

Speaker(s)

Lee Yu Zhou is a founding engineer of Abnormal Security, a next generation Email Security company, where he leads a team of Software and Machine Learning Engineers to build systems and solutions within its core detection product. He has spent the last 4 years working on the frontlines of the email security problem, building out its core detection technology, including several novel and patented detection solutions for modern email security threats. Previously, he co-founded an agriculture technology startup, Farmshots, which was acquired in 2018 by Synenta, a leading agricultural company. He holds a degree in Computer Science from Duke University.

03:45 PM - 04:00 PM

Gamifying to a Smarter Nation

A Smart Nation is built together with her citizens. However, despite the rapid adoption of technology amongst the people, agencies still find it challenging to engage the nation not only at scale but also in an operationally efficient manner, and harness the power of the collective intelligence of the crowd. From citizens with specialised skill sets to the ideas and feedback of the general public, the citizens of a nation in collaboration with the government presents as an untapped mine of possibilities. Following in the footsteps of successful brands and companies, gamification is a concept that has been used to engage customers and fans on a global scale with much success. Regardless of age, culture or language, play is a term that is widely understood by the crowd and is an effective tool to drive meaningful engagement with an audience. At Crowdtask.sg, we believe that gamification can be the spark that drives the ethos of a more engaged nation. We are excited to share the different ways gamification can help shape the behavior of the nation, where the ultimate goal is to have citizens intrinsically motivated to engage with agencies to build better products and policies. We are also proud to introduce our newly launched platform, which will help push Singapore towards a smarter tomorrow.

Theme: Smart City: Vision to Reality

Who should attend

Agencies who are interested in engaging their communities to help build a smarter nation.

Speaker(s)

03:45 PM - 04:00 PM

Indexing Videos on VAS

As volume of video data grows, it comes to a point where identifying and categorising videos based on relevant concepts becomes very laborious. With the advancement of AI technology, it is possible for a less labour-intensive method to derive context from videos that can help the retrieval of relevant video content more easily. Govtech’s Video Analytics System (VAS) intends to address this with the implementation of Video Indexer. Powered by Azure Cognitive services, we will share our views and approach of how agencies can adopt AI-enabled computer vision solutions for their use cases, utilising both commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) and those built by Govtech’s DSAID-VA team. With VAS as a platform for VA, we intend to bring ease of access to video analytics capabilities across WOG agencies.

Theme: Datafication

Who should attend

Agency users interested in exploring the use of video indexing.

Speaker(s)

Henry is a lead product manager in the Datascience and AI Division at GovTech, where he leads product development of the Video Analytics. With over 20 years of diverse industry experience across product management and technical development on global products across multinational organisations. He is passionate about building products that make technology accessible for improving everyday lives.

03:45 PM - 04:00 PM

Serverless Revolution: Functions or Containers

What does it truly mean to modernise? In your journey to cloud, you will have some applications you rewrite or refactor into new cloud native workloads. As a developer, you have choices for deployment, including container based platforms based on Kubernetes, Event Driven Architectures with Kafka and Lambda, and many others. With all the architecture options for compute, this session will focus on key pillars for modernisation, including strategies for workloads, automation, DevOps, performance, resiliency, observability, security, and culture.

Theme: Beyond Cloud

Who should attend

CTOs, Software Architects, Engineers, Developers, Platform Builders, DevOps Engineers, and SREs.

Speaker(s)

Roland is the Worldwide Solution Architecture Director for Serverless at AWS. Roland has led the building of transformational Cloud Solutioning assets focused on enterprise adoption, including Kubernetes, App Modernisation, Microservices, Serverless, Integration, and App Development. He is recognised for creating industry-leading architecture blueprints and is a recognised leader in the client adoption of cloud strategy. Roland is a former IBM Fellow, has written 5 books, written over 50 articles, and has a Master's Degree from NJIT.

* Please note that the programme may be subject to change without prior notice


Bonus Track

Enterprise Ready AI: Managing Governance and Risk

Even the safest roads have guardrails to keep drivers from falling off the edge. It’s the same with machine learning. A well-designed model, coupled with proper governance, can help prevent unintended outcomes. You need a good mix of people, processes, and technologies to minimise risks when managing your AI projects. In this session, Ted Kwartler will provide some strategies for building good governance processes and tips for monitoring your AI system. He’ll show you how to get started by creating a plan for governance, identifying your existing resources, and where to ask for help.

The audience will learn:
- The importance of context, operations, and development in ML governance.
- How to evaluate diverse types of risk.
- Which industries are experiencing regulatory pressure.
- Tips to deliver value and reduce risk using DataRobot’s technology.

Theme: Datafication

Who should attend

This session will be suited to a general business audience and will be useful for anyone who has models in deployment that wants to understand more about frameworks for managing risk, removing bias and deal with regulatory compliance.

Speaker(s)

Ted Kwartler is the VP of Trusted AI at DataRobot. At DataRobot, Ted sets product strategy for explainable and ethical uses of data technology in the company's applications. Ted brings unique insights and experience utilising data, business acumen and ethics to his current and previous positions at Liberty Mutual Insurance and Amazon. In addition to having 4 DataCamp courses, he teaches graduate courses at the Harvard Extension School and is the author of Text Mining in Practice with R. Ted is an advisor to the US Government Bureau of Economic Affairs sitting on a Congressionally mandated committed called the "Advisory Committee for Data for Evidence Building" advocating for data-driven policies.

Best Practice Migrations to Cloud

Do you want to better understand what it takes to migrate a critical e-commerce client from a legacy on-premise system to Cloud? Want to learn more about the steps to migrate, its risks/pitfalls and the end to end methodology of one of Singapore's leading e-commerce organisation? I will also touch on the modernisation elements to move from a legacy monolith architecture to a micro services architecture, and the business and end customer benefits.

Theme: Beyond Cloud

Who should attend

CEOs, CTOs, CMOs, Head of Technology/ Infrastructure, Head of Marketing.

Speaker(s)

Callum is Managing Director of Just After Midnight, Asia. Callum has over a decade of experience working in cloud and infrastructure sales and consulting across Europe and Asia-Pacific. Callum is a certified Open Group Master Architect with extensive migration experience across multiple industries.

Introduction to enCRYPT: The Central Privacy Toolkit

enCRYPT is a new one-stop, self-service, central privacy toolkit that helps public sector users apply anonymisation techniques to sensitive datasets, while preserving the data’s value for sharing and analysis.

Find out how enCRYPT can help your agency transform your datasets to meet the new IM8 Anonymisation Guidelines, address re-identification risks, and manage privacy-utility tradeoffs.

Theme: Datafication

Who should attend

CISOs, CDOs, and any public service officers dealing with data sharing issues.

Speaker(s)

Alan is the product manager for new and experimental team focused on harnessing the benefits of Privacy-Preserving Technologies for the public sector. Prior to joining GovTech, Alan worked as a cyber threat analyst dissecting key threats and actors in cyberspace. He is passionate about working at the intersection of policy, technology and citizen needs.

Zul Yang is a software engineer at GovTech building solutions to protect citizens’ privacy. Prior to joining GovTech, he was with the Singapore Civil Defence Force’s Transformation and Future Technology Department developing products to enhance emergency response and public safety.

Fairness in AI: How can Algorithmic Approaches Guide AI Governance?

Artificial intelligence ("AI") is now a ubiquitous feature in many products we use or processes we interact with, from our mobile phones to our loan applications. With its meteoric rise comes a new set of challenges: AI models have been found to be systematically biased against historically disadvantaged groups, and this is especially problematic for important applications of AI in the space of credit risk ratings, university admissions, and even parole decisions. In this lightning talk, we dive into the emerging field of algorithmic fairness, which focuses on how to incorporate fairness into AI algorithms itself, and highlight the important technical and legal implications it has on AI governance.

Theme: Tech for Tomorrow

Who should attend

Anyone interested in AI governance or fairness in AI applications.

Speaker(s)

Shaun is a data scientist in the Data Science and AI Division (DSAID) at GovTech. He leads the forward-deployed data science team at the Ministry of Manpower, where he has worked on a variety of projects from building policy simulation dashboards to developing neural networks for text classification. Having studied both political philosophy and data science, he is interested in the ethical and fairness implications of AI and how algorithmic approaches can address them. Outside of work, he enjoys good food, great books, and excellent coffee.

Zi En is a State Counsel at the Attorney-General's Chambers, where she advises the Government on a wide spectrum of legal issues. She was previously a Legal Consultant at the World Bank. Zi En is interested in and has published papers on the intersection of law and technology, such as drones and privacy, and intermediary rights. She is dual-qualified in Singapore and New York, and graduated with an LLB from Singapore Management University and a LLM from New York University.

Securing Kubernetes OpenShift Clusters to Ensure Maximum Safety with Minimal Efforts

Data is the new oil. The more you mine it, the better the results. Information extracted holds the power to unlock new horizons. However, the high value associated with the data comes at a cost, i.e making it vulnerable to external threats. It becomes imperative that the organisations have to spend quality efforts and resources to safeguard this data, be it at rest or in transit.

Various SaaS offerings run into numerous threats that come in different shapes and sizes. More so, if you are into Database and Datawarehouse offerings, that are integrated and managed as part of the Cluster Management. It requires a good amount of expertise wrt tools and utilities of cluster management resources, exposure to a varied degree of integrations and interactions, and familiarity with the nature of threats coming in the form of hacking, intrusion, etc, to be able to safeguard the data.

In this lightning talk, they share their thoughts on the process and steps that will help build/prepare the Kubernetes and OpenShift clusters to be safe and secure, insulating them from external threats.

Some methodologies and measures that strengthen the security aspects are:
- Securing the container images,
- Access control to the source code,
- End point detection and response,
- Vulnerability scanning of endpoints,
- Inventory management,
- Log analysis and SIEM, and
- Pod Security Policies (SCC).

Theme: Building Digital Trust

Co-Contributors of Content

Mr Hrishikesh Kumar, Advisory Software Engineer, IBM
Mr Thuan Ngo, Advisory Software Engineer, IBM

Who should attend

- Cloud Architects & Engineers working on Cluster Orchestration in a multi-cloud environment.
- Application Developers involved in development of a Cloud Service.
- Developers involved in building applications on Cloud.
- Security Experts and Compliance teams that overlook product/service security on Cloud.

Speaker(s)

An experienced software professional, Prasanna Alur Mathada is currently an Infrastructure SRE Ops resource managing Kubernetes clusters and Infrastructure management in a multi-cloud environment.

He holds a Post Graduate Diploma in Business Administration with specialisation in Marketing. As a skilled engineer, he brings vast amounts of experience in the areas of Internet of Things (IoT), Business Development (In India & South East Asia), Relational Databases, and Product Interoperability, in over 16 years of a corporate career at IBM. He is a seasoned team player with hands-on experience in technologies such as Informix databases, Time Series Analytics, Data Warehousing, Developer Experience and DevOps SRE.

An avid reader & blogger, he has a penchant for technology courses. In addition to numerous published articles, blogs, and technical white papers, he has 4 Patents, 7 File rated disclosures, and numerous Publish-rated disclosures in the areas of Cognitive analytics, Emerging technologies and Artificial Intelligence.

* Please note that the programme may be subject to change without prior notice


Last updated 25 November 2022


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