This is the first workshop of its kind to bring together a community of practitioners involving those in port management and operations, and the technologists and scientists to identify and develop practical solutions to tackle what I call day-to-day "wicked" problems. These are challenges faced by our ground officers day in/day out, requiring immense time and effort.

I am encouraged by the strong support from all the participating agencies, especially A*STAR's RIs - I2R, IHPC and SERC - as well as IDA as we embark on this effort. This initiative is also timely given MPA's Next Generation Port 2030 as well as IDA's Smarter Nation Initiative. We would certainly want to be part of this initiative as it offers us a chance to showcase what our future port operations would look like.

The maritime sector is an important and growing part of our economy. As it stands, it contributes to 6-7% of our economy and provides employment to 170,000 people. In a new index that was just launched recently called the Xinhua-Baltic Exchange International Shipping Centers Development Index, Singapore took top spot among international shipping centres, which is a broader matrix than what current indices focus on - namely the size, efficiency and throughput of a port. Next in line was London and Shanghai.

We are clearly in the line of sight for many aspirational maritime centres and even well-established players like London and Hong Kong are waking up to the challenge. It is clear to me doing more of the same will not keep up us at the top of the league. We must constantly innovate, and this desire to innovate and be responsive to our customers' needs will be the key differentiating factor in the new competitive landscape.

The idea of bringing together the operations and technology people is of course not new. It is adopted from the SAF where it was felt that the best way to meet the needs of our military personnel in the field was not for each of them to address these needs separately but jointly, so that the solutions developed involve the people who will have to use them. The SAF is one of the pioneers of this approach because in the early days of our build up when we lacked the resources, this was the best way to come up with cost-effective solutions that are practical, yet scalable and replicable.

These efforts have led to many enhancements to our National Service, such as light weight but durable combat equipment from webbing, boots to uniform, the SAR with telescopic sight to overcome the large incidence of myopia of our soldiers, to the reduction in the manpower required to operate everything from LSTs to artillery pieces. It has also led to various innovations. For example, during the SARS crisis, a device that was developed to detect enemies in the dark was adapted to scan for fever in people. We are now all familiar with the thermal scanner developed by ST electronics and DSTA. During SARS, Singapore was the first to deploy such a system, giving our public efforts against SARS a major psychological boost.

I first became interested in ops-tech when I helmed NEA. Just like the SAF, NEA officers with their broad scope of work have to face numerous operational challenges on the ground. Much of their work is labour intensive, gruelling and often thankless in nature- from checking for mosquitoes, catching litter bugs, inspecting food establishments for hygiene lapses, to detecting sources of pollution and catching smoky vehicles, among other things.

With limited resources and a more demanding public, it was a challenge to step up our efforts on the ground. It was quite impossible to be everywhere all the time. Hence, I felt we needed to leverage on technology as a force multiplier. It began with a series of questions- what if we could pre-empt incidents from happening? What if we could respond to incidents quicker? What if we could both detect and prevent? How best could we deploy our limited manpower to tackle areas of highest risk? What would a risk-based approach entail? How do we harness data for greater sense-making and problem-solving?

These series of questions led to various projects that formed the nucleus of the ops-tech efforts at NEA. We worked with advisors such as RADM Richard Lim and A*STAR to develop a more coherent Ops-Tech Roadmap across all the key areas of our operations. We also teamed up with organisations such as IBM to leverage on their data analytics capabilities. Later on, DSTA came on board and applied their operations research, and we started using Monte Carlo simulations to determine how best to deploy our dengue inspection teams to homes for maximum coverage, taking into account time of day, probable rejections by homeowners and manpower available. I would suggest that the Ops-Tech team in MPA invite NEA to share on their Ops-Tech efforts in your next workshop.

Some of the NEA ops-tech projects include:

- Prediction of extreme local weather events such as heavy rain and wind that can cause major public disruption e.g. floods and falling trees
- Prediction of food poisoning incidents harnessing social media
- High speed CCTV and video analytics for catching high-rise litterbugs
- Rapid diagnostic kits for detection of dengue serotype, gravi-trap for mosquito control purposes, and an aerosol spray that is more lethal than the conventional aerosol spray
- Use of sensors and harnessing public feedback from smart phone devices and apps for audit of public hygiene and cleanliness

Similarly, in the maritime sector, there are many similar operational challenges looking for solutions. In the case of MPA, we should be thinking of how we can:
- Better detection of vessels in our port limits that infringe our regulations, during the day and at night either from shore or our patrol vessels, despite inclements of weather, sea state etc
- Better/faster response to oil spills and other environmental pollution at sea and greater situational awareness for emergency management
- Prevention of accidents and other workplace safety lapses on shore/sea, or alerts on equipment malfunction
- Better assessment of hazardous cargo with protection of our officers who conduct the inspections
- Crowdsource useful information from maritime community and/or provide collective response to marine safety incidents including vessels in distress

Today's session includes our terminal operators, PSA and JP. I am sure you also have your own operational challenges to tackle, such as optimization of berth space, vessel arrivals/departures and accident prevention. I would encourage you to share these with the agencies present. MPA would also be similarly supportive of Ops-Tech efforts undertaken by our terminal operators.

The technologies that can help us ease the workload and efforts of our people are available today. From sensors to wearable technology, it is a matter of articulating what these challenges are and how we can apply these technologies to address these challenges in a way that is practical can make a huge difference to their effectiveness. It may require us to apply concepts developed in another area of operations to our own areas of operations. Innovation comes in many different forms and it is important that we keep an open mind, think out of the box, and laterally.

I believe that technology can be a powerful force multiplier for all our efforts. One caveat we must bear in mind is that in all that we do, we cannot eliminate the human factor. Whatever solutions developed should factor in the human dimension and in fact, strengthen the human dimension whether in terms of user-friendliness of the solutions we develop or reinforces the exercise of human judgement and instincts.

Today's conference is just a start of a series of workshops that MPA will conduct as it develops its corporate ops-tech roadmap. I wish everyone a fruitful workshop and I look forward to the outcomes.

Thank you.