Innovation Grant Call

The DTC Singapore Innovation Grant Call is a competitive research funding initiative that seeks to support collaboration between Singapore-based Institute of Higher Learning (IHLs)/Research Institutes (RIs) and companies with a presence in Singapore (“companies”) to co-develop Trust Tech solutions. The goal is to promote and facilitate innovation in Trust Tech, support digital transformation and translation into actual use cases. IHLs/RIs are required to collaborate with companies (“team”) to form multi-disciplinary teams and consortia of industry domain experts, engineers, researchers, scientists, academics and other professionals to be eligible for this grant.

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Scope of Innovation Grant Call

The DTC Singapore Innovation Grant Call will partner IHLs/RIs with companies to focus on trust technologies. We are particularly interested in research that has great potential to:

• Generate innovations in trust technologies that can support digital transformation and can be translated into actual use cases,
• Address systemic real-world problems in the field that, once solved, can be scaled for other players in the sector or industry.

The proposed opportunities and focus areas shall include, but are not limited to, the following: 

Trusted Analysis and Compute

The main focus will be related to sharing of sensitive data/model in artificial intelligence and machine learning. The emphasis will be on trust technologies enhanced computation without disclosing the actual raw data and/or analytic model:

• Privacy-preserving AI
• Privacy-preserving tech:
  • Full Homomorphic Encryption (FHE)
  • Searchable Symmetric Encryption (SSE) with analytics
  • Data Synthesis (DS)
  • Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC)
  • Federated Learning (FL)
  • Differential Privacy (DP)
  
  

Decentralisation and Web 3.0

The focus will be on verifiable credentials/documents and transferable records in a decentralised environment, track and trace in supply chain, digital identity and analytics on decentralised finance:

• Blockchain analytics (in particular, against financial crimes)
• Trusted decentralised digital identity
• Decentralised computing and storage systems

Trusted Accreditation

The focus will be on: (i) foundational AI model risks that impact on the entire AI ecosystem, (ii) services and platform available to perform foundational AI model risk assessments, and (iii) mechanisms to avoid AI risks (or at least reduce the impact of collective failure of AI ecosystem).

• Trustworthy AI
  • Function as intended
  • No unauthorised modifications
  • Operated in a secure manner
• Responsible AI – Traditional AI risks of users and organisations.
  • Fair, Transparent, Explainable
  • Accountable, Ethically developed
  • No misuse of data in favour of ML
• Safe AI - Frontier AI risks of societal harms and public safety.
  • Harmful content, Value Alignment
  • Disinformation, Hallucination
  • Copyright, Data supply chain risk

Full details of the scope for the grant call can be found in the DTC Singapore Innovation Grant Call Rules and Guidelines

Evaluation Criteria

The proposed research, problem scope, technical approach, and potential impacts of the proposal shall be defined by the team. Moreover, proposals should clearly state the following:

• Alignment of the proposal to DTC Singapore’s objective and direction
• Concise problem statement for a well-defined real-life use case, where trust is a major concern and trust technology is critical to address the problem
• Potential benefit of a co-developed solution to enable digitalisation and digital transformation, and impact on the sector or industry when scaled for other players.

The timeline for this DTC Singapore Innovation Grant Call is shown below:

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Contact Information

For any queries, please contact DTC@ntu.edu.sg.