GovTech Singapore’s Innovation Day spotlights AI projects, prompt engineering
By Yogesh Hirdaramani
The inaugural Innovation Day was held on November 15 and showcased AI prototypes built by government officers to tackle agency problems.
Through a series of five tasks, the three finalists of the Prompt Royale competition put their prompt engineering skills to the test on stage. Image: GovTech Singapore
Three finalists were tasked with typing in prompts into an AI platform to write HTML code for websites, build chatbots that could recommend sporting activities, and ensure that their bots were protected from jailbreak attempts, all within an hour.
This was the culmination of Prompt Royale, a whole-of-government prompt engineering competition which ran for five months as part of GovTech Singapore’s whole-of-government Data & AI Tournament, the largest such competition within the Singapore government.
Prompt Royale’s finale took place on November 15, as part of GovTech Singapore’s Innovation Day, and featured three finalists competing across five tasks in a live showdown, tapping on prompt engineering frameworks such as CO-STAR, which was developed by GovTech Singapore’s Data Science and AI team.
Over 1,000 officers from 75 agencies took part in Prompt Royale this year.
The Innovation Day, which also showcased prototypes from recent AI development programmes in the Singapore government, was “an illustration of our National AI Strategy 2.0 vision,” said Senior Minister of State for Digital Development and Information, Dr Janil Puthucheary during the opening keynote.
Prompt engineering showdown
Prompt Royale’s finalists included a data scientist from the Housing Development Board (HDB), Ananya Balehithlu; an emergency medical technician from Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF), Md Naim Zahari; and a senior manager at the Ministry of Manpower (MOM), Rachel Tiang. Zahari emerged as the champion.
The latter two participants did not have any technical background before participating in Prompt Royale, which provided public officers with workshops to improve their prompt engineering capabilities.
These workshops covered the use of whole-of-government AI platforms such as AIBots and Playground Bot, which allow agencies to build their own chatbots and experiment with large language models (LLMs) respectively.
“Through Prompt Royale X, over 550 officers tackled prompt engineering challenges tailored to your agency’s specific needs. That is a very important long-term, big picture outcome,” said Dr Janil.
“[It's] not just that GovTech and Ministry for Digital Development and Information (MDDI) centrally develops all these platforms and capabilities, but that you are taking these approaches, these technologies, and these ideas back and applying them back to the problems that you and your agency colleagues face.”
AI programmes to upskill AI
Innovation Day also showcased AI prototypes from two innovation programmes run by GovTech Singapore, the LAUNCH! Programme and the AI Champions Bootcamp (ABC). Both aim to nurture the development of impactful AI products within the Singapore government.
Under the LAUNCH! programme, public officers across 77 agencies submitted more than 600 ideas to be developed this year. Selected ideas progressed to hackathon sprints, during which the participants worked with GovTech engineers and data scientists to prototype and develop their solutions.
These hackathon sprints involved design thinking workshops, product workshops, and sandbox environments.
“We want to enable citizens, businesses, and public sector officers, our public sector workforce to use AI confidently responsibly, and creatively.
“Within the government, we have to play our part, and we want to empower our officers with the AI skills to make a difference within your agencies, across the whole-of-government, and for Singapore,” said Dr Janil.
The prototypes featured at Innovation Day reflected how government officers have taken up the call to develop and apply their AI skills at scale, he said.
AI prototypes featured
One prototype from this year’s LAUNCH! programme was a Translation Global Search Tool, an in-house solution that supports public officers in searching and retrieving past translations for reuse, using both exact search and semantic search.
As MDDI receives more than 1,000 translation requests per year, this tool is projected to deliver annual cost savings of at least S$30,000 and can be scaled up for use across the government.
The AI Champions Bootcamp, which trains participants from across the government in advanced prompting techniques and to build powerful LLM tools, also saw four products featured at Innovation Day.
These included AskEconomist, a tool which allows users to retrieve information from past research decks by the Economist Service, a professional scheme within the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI).
Using the tool, users can ask questions and search for decks from over the past 10 years when conducting literature reviews, which would otherwise be difficult to find.
“This spirit of problem-solving is very important. It’s not that we’re doing AI for the sake of AI. We’re not doing this for buzzwords, but to solve problems that our agencies, our officers, and our citizens face,” said Dr Janil.