I am happy to join you today for the launch of this Urban Lab exhibition on ‘Our Digital World’.

This is part of a series of exhibitions that URA has been hosting in its Urban Lab space, which started in Jan 2015. We have had three so far. The first one was on the research potential for breakthroughs in Future Cities; the second one was on drones and unmanned vehicular technology; the third exhibition was on new energy solutions in cities.

Today we are having our fourth in the series of exhibitions, and this is really a part of our larger effort to bring together the private and public sectors to showcase research ideas that can transform our built environment and to nurture the R&D eco-system in Singapore, and bring together stakeholders to collaborate and to translate R&D into practice.

Today we are very happy to have this exhibition on the digital world, or really about digital data. I think it is an important issue that will increasingly becoming more and more relevant for us, and for cities of the future. It is going to be a major game-changer for all of us because the technological surge in big data is just getting started, and there is much more that will come. The cost of processing, of bandwidth, of memory, sensors and storage is continuing to fall exponentially. Cloud computing will make all these resources available on demand across the world, so digital data will become more pervasive, and it will allow us to run experiments and learn at an ever increasing scale.

Importantly, I think there will also be a larger pool of innovators, entrepreneurs and techies that will come to the fore and who will be able to bring new skills and potentially offer new breakthroughs. I was reminded of this just over the weekend because we launched our very first HDB Hackathon over the weekend. We had huge response from many young people. I was pleasantly surprised to see the strong response and enthusiasm from young people, both studying overseas and in Singapore, doing IT and computer science. There was a time we were that we did not have enough young people going into computer science fields, I think that is changing because I see many of them now studying overseas and in Singapore. Some of them were back from overseas on holiday, and they were participating in the Hackathon and developing apps that will help us improve our HDB living. It is a very positive sign that things are changing and there is a growing interest in this.
With the availability of data, with more people entering this space, both in Singapore and globally, I think we are just scratching the surface of the potential on big data. It will change the way we do things in many fields, including in urban design and planning, where big data potentially will emerge as a new paradigm of development.

Interestingly, I think this is harkening back in many ways to the wisdom of the past. If you think about how many old cities are developed – they are developed along “desire lines”. The streets of old cities evolved around desire lines. Desire lines are the natural foot paths that have developed as people move from one place to another. The streets of all old cities are built around desire lines. Urban planners always look for where the desire lines are, in order to improve their designs. With big data, I think we will better able to identify these desire lines, we can identify relevant patterns and we will be able to detect new insights about the way social and economic activities are taking place in the city. All these will help us to be more efficient and effective in planning, designing and building new infrastructure for the future.

This is not just some abstract futuristic idea. It is already taking place today. One good example is the way we are using big data from our EZ link cards. We have over 4 million public transport trips made in Singapore every day. The EZ link cards store a large amount of data, including the origin and destination of commuter trips, the type of public transport used, and the time the trips are made. All of this data can be put together in order to reconstruct and visualise commuter flow and transport modes.
Urban and transport planners can use this data in many ways. They can gain insights on when certain bus routes are more heavily used, how much time a resident takes to travel to the CBD during morning peak hours – they will be better understand the transport situation on the ground, and they can identify areas for improvement in the public transport network and also in our land use plans, to help commuters cut down on travel time. This is one example which we are already starting to do work on, and I am sure the potential will continue to increase.

Data analytics can be applied not just to data about human actions but also data about the environment. URA and HDB have been collecting data on the environment and they have also developed environmental simulation tools - tools that will make use of the data and simulate the interaction of environmental factors such as wind and temperature with our urban landscape. With that kind of tools, our planners can test out various mitigating measures in our built design and urban environment, and identify the best scenarios and the best plans that will allow for a more comfortable living environment. Again, tools that are already being used and I think we can push the potential even further, because these projects are just the tip of the iceberg.

Our government agencies, private sector industry, research institutes are developing more of such tools in all of these areas – which will enable us to make more informed decisions, provide us with a good living environment, and create economic opportunities at the same time.

To spur more of such innovation, it is important to have access to the right data sets. That is why the government will make machine-readable data more readily available. We already have a “data.gov.sg” portal which collates public-availably data from 70 government agencies. This uses data visualisation to make datasets relevant and understandable to the public. The open data in the portal has already contributed to over 100 applications being developed in the private and public sectors, and they are reaping benefits for users already, and we hope many more can come up, many more ground-up initiatives can take place, making use of this data, even as we are expanding the scope of the data sets that are available in data.gov.sg.

While big data offers tremendous advantages, I would just add some words of caution; we also have to be mindful of some of the risks. First, there are legitimate concerns about data privacy and protection. There are safeguards that we can make use of to address these concerns which we must take very seriously. For example, making sure that data is anonymised to remove any information that can be linked to a specific individual. Or for that matter, ensuring that government agencies take steps to protect the data and make sure that data systems are well-protected. Those are safeguards that we must all take seriously.

Second word of caution is that even as we embrace the data; let us not lose sight of the important role that citizens play in building our nation. It is people, and not data, that are at the centre of our policies and planning efforts. Data is a useful way of understanding human actions and human preferences, they can offer new insights for policies and planning, but people cannot be reduced into digits or pixels in a graphic display. It is not like SIM city, this is for real. I think if we understand that, we should use data wisely, we should step up the use of data, but we must always remember to put people first in our efforts.

In conclusion, I would say the future of city planning is an exciting one. The advancement in digital technology is transforming the way we work, the way we plan, and some of the tools exhibited are already used in the planners’ work today. Some of the things that you see in the exhibition are already in used, but others are still in the experimental stage and will in time, help us push the envelope even further in city planning.

I am very heartened to see a vibrant community in Singapore collaborating in this space. It is a very diverse community coming together collaborating in this area of big data, and we have active participation from academia, research institutions and industries. I hope this exhibition will inspire more of such collaborations and innovations for the betterment of our city and our future.

Thank you very much and please enjoy the exhibition.