Singapore has launched a Digital Trust Centre (DTC) to lead the country’s research and development (R&D) efforts for trust technologies, and support talent development in this space.
Singapore’s Minister for Communications and Information, Josephine Teo, said the centre is funded by a S$50 million investment from the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) and the National Research Foundation (NRF) under the Research, Innovation and Enterprise (RIE) 2025 plan.
Trust technologies help augment systems in the areas of privacy, accountability, identity, integrity, fairness, safety, and compliance.
Teo said as technology evolves, new risks will emerge.
“Therefore, it is important to invest in trust technologies such as privacy-enhancing technologies that preserve data privacy while the data is being analysed, as well as trustworthy AI technologies which help verify and explain the expected performance of AI systems,” she said.
DTC will be hosted by the Nanyang Technological University (NTU).
Teo said the centre was a national effort to focus on four key areas of trust technologies.
The four areas are:
- Trust tech research – Enable Institutes of Higher Learning (IHL) and research institutes to pursue research excellence in trust technologies and drive local and international collaborations.
- Trust tech innovations – Encourage academia and enterprises to co-develop and mature research ideas into market-ready solutions.
- New sandbox environment – Enable businesses to experiment with Trust Technologies to alleviate challenges with data sharing.
- Deepen local capabilities – Nurture 100 R&D talents in digital trust.
Singapore is a founding member of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), which is a multi-stakeholder initiative that fosters international cooperation to bridge the theory and practice of AI.
The country contributes actively to GPAI through expert groups such as data governance and commercialisation.
Singapore plans to step up its contributions to GPAI through the DTC.
Related to this, IMDA and the International Centre of Expertise of Montreal for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (CEIMIA) signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on Wednesday for one of the world’s first cross-border collaborations on privacy-enhancing technologies.
Under this, solutions will be developed to demonstrate how privacy-enhancing technologies can overcome privacy and compliance challenges for organisations building novel applications that leverage cross-organisation and cross-border data.
The experience is expected to guide future research and development, business adoption of privacy-enhancing technologies and contribute towards the development of international standards.
The DTC will be the implementation partner for this collaboration between the IMDA and CEIMIA, which is one of the two centres of expertise for GPAI.
