Speech by NTU President Professor Subra Suresh at the Schuman Business Talk with Mr Marcus Wallenberg
Speech by
Professor Subra Suresh
President, Nanyang Technological University
SCHUMAN BUSINESS TALK
WITH MARCUS WALLENBERG
Novena Campus, Library, Level 20
11 Mandalay Road, Singapore 308232
Tuesday, 3 July 2018, 9:00am
Mr Marcus Wallenberg, Chairman of the Board of Directors, SEB,
Mr Koh Boon Hwee, Chairman of the NTU Board of Trustees,
Mr Stefano Poli, President, European Chamber of Commerce, Singapore,
Mr Jan Stjernström, President, Swedish Chamber of Commerce, Singapore,
Distinguished guests,
Ladies and gentlemen,
Good morning and a very warm welcome on behalf of NTU Singapore to our Novena Campus. It is a pleasure to have all of you here today.
NTU is honoured to host this inaugural edition of the Schuman Business Talk with Mr Marcus Wallenberg, who is no stranger to Singapore, and it is all the more meaningful given Singapore's strong ties with Sweden, but also between NTU and Sweden.
Sweden is an important exchange partner of NTU. The country has consistently been one of the top five destinations for our students to go to on exchange while annually, the largest number of exchange students coming to NTU are also from Sweden. In the past decade or so, NTU has received over 1,800 students from Swedish institutions while sending more than 1,700 of our own to Sweden. I wish to express my gratitude to my predecessor, Professor Bertil Andersson, for what he did for NTU, and for fostering close ties between NTU and Sweden.
Aside from student and faculty exchanges, NTU's connections in Sweden have resulted in partnerships with enterprises ABB, Camfil, Lightlab Sweden, and SAAB; joint academic programmes with top Swedish institutions such as KTH, Karolinska, Chalmers and Lund; and joint research projects and conferences with many organisations, including with the Wallenberg Foundations.
Earlier this year, my colleagues and I announced our vision to transform NTU into a Smart Campus. Our aim is to harness the power of digital technology and tech-enabled solutions to support better learning and living experiences, the discovery of new knowledge, and the sustainable use of resources.
In January of this year, NTU and Volvo Buses announced a partnership to jointly develop and test autonomous electric buses in Singapore. The buses will be tested from 2019 at the university's autonomous vehicle test circuit, which is modelled after real road conditions in Singapore. The NTU-Volvo programme is supported by Singapore's premier transport provider SMRT and leading technology group ABB.
Building on this momentum, NTU is therefore proud to be partnering with the Wallenberg Foundations through the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Programme. This partnership leverages the strengths of NTU and Swedish universities to build competencies in robotics, integrated technology and intelligent systems that can autonomously respond and adapt to environmental input.
The collaboration arose from two NTU-WASP workshops in 2017 that facilitated the sharing of ideas and building on existing synergies. These workshops yielded six joint research projects in computer vision, visualization, sensor fusion, cloud computing artificial intelligence and big data, that will amount to a total value of S$4 million over three years.
Sweden aims to be one of the most R&D intensive countries in the world with the equivalent of US$3.9 billion (0.8% GDP) invested in publicly funded research in 2015. This mirrors Singapore's US$14 billion (S$19 billion) commitment through the Research Innovation Enterprise 2020 Plan that supports Singapore's R&D efforts from 2016 to 2020.
NTU is equally committed to these values and collaborations between our two countries such as the one between NTU and the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Programme that emphasise inter-disciplinary research and development, and that will sharpen Singapore's and Sweden's technological edge.
I am also excited that Mr Wallenberg, through the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, is announcing a landmark gift of 50 million Swedish krona to support cutting-edge research at NTU Singapore. This is the largest single gift by a foreign entity to our university. NTU is also privileged to be the third university internationally to benefit from the Foundation's support for cutting-edge research and technologies.
The gift will go towards establishing a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship – the Wallenberg-NTU Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship. The Fellowship will enable some of the world's most promising young minds to carry out their research at NTU, which has been ranked one of the world's top universities, and by some metrics, the best young university in the world.
The Fellows will also have the opportunity to be hosted by Sweden's top universities in their second year, and benefit from additional research funding, which will further deepen innovation and research linkages between Singapore and Sweden.
In closing, I am honoured to have Mr Wallenberg on NTU's Novena campus. His passionate commitment to excellent research through support from the Wallenberg Foundation is admirable especially for a research-intensive global university like NTU. I very much look forward to what we can do together between NTU and the Wallenberg Foundations.
Next week, about 10 of my NTU colleagues and I will be at the 35th International Conference on Machine Learning in Stockholm that many of the Wallenberg faculty is also participating.
At the recent International Joint Conference on AI (IJCAI) 2018 AI Video Competition, two out of four awards went to NTU faculty. Many faculty at NTU are making a very important mark, which was recognised by Nikkei and Elsevier, earlier this year, by placing NTU as the top university for Artificial Intelligence research among universities, right after Microsoft Corporation.
So I very much look forward to not only what my colleagues can do, but what we can do together with the Wallenberg Foundations. I am very grateful to Mr Wallenberg for being here, for your strong support.
Thank you.