The 2022 edition of the Singapore Prize awarded 12 winners across all the island-state’s official languages at a ceremony held tonight (August 25). A number of the awards were presented to individuals rather than institutions, including the inaugural Singapore Science and Technology Award for Young Scientists.
A housing complex for senior citizens beat out more flashy competition to win the World Building of the Year award at the World Architecture Festival this week. The winner, Kampung Admiralty in the capital of Singapore, integrates public facilities and community space alongside over 100 apartments for the elderly.
Britain’s Prince William attended the Earthshot prize ceremony in Singapore this week, which awarded more than $1 million to green innovators working on projects ranging from a cleaner lithium-ion battery to ocean conservation. He praised the “light of optimism” burning bright in this year’s winners, who were all presented with the annual 1 million-pound ($1.23 million) prize at a ceremony at the Mediacorp theatre.
During the evening, the organisers of the prize also announced the results of a consumer choice vote for the “readers’ favorite” shortlisted works. The two winners of the English fiction category — Straits Times journalist Akshita Nanda’s debut novel Nimita’s Place, about two women navigating society’s expectations in India and Singapore, and the speculative short story collection Lion City by Ng Yi-Sheng — each won a book-purchase voucher worth 1,000 Singapore dollars ($719) from Epigram Books. The readers’ favorite Tamil title went to rmaa cureess (Rama Suresh) for her poetry collection Gaze Back, a clarion call for gender and linguistic reclamation that the judges described as searing in its “universal appetite”.
AI Singapore has launched a new competition to spur advancement of online safety models. Its Online Safety Prize Challenge will advance AI research in developing multimodal, multilingual, and zero-shot models that are able to discern between benign and harmful memes on social media. The contest will run for 10 weeks and will include a seed fund of $100,000 to get things started.
Singapore’s Millennium Technology Prize has begun its first official cooperation with a university, signing a letter of intent with Nanyang Technological University. The universities are both frequently ranked among the world’s top 30 in major international rankings.
In a show of solidarity with the families of those who lost their lives in a bomb blast at an office block in central Bangkok this week, all three of Singapore’s parliament buildings will be lit up orange tomorrow, November 20, as part of a nationwide observance of National Day. The blasts were the result of a terrorism-related incident at a nearby construction site, and police have arrested two suspects. A total of 78 people were injured in the attack, including seven Singaporeans. The blasts were the deadliest in Thailand’s history. The Ministry of Home Affairs has issued a statement to condemn the attacks and to urge those in the area to remain vigilant. The ministry said that it would work with the relevant authorities to investigate the incident.