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SingaporeMay 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — The 2026 Asia Tech Summit (ATxSummit 2026), organized by Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), officially kicked off tonight at Gardens by the Bay, with Singapore President Tharman Shanmugaratnam attending the opening gala dinner as the guest of honor. This year’s summit brings together high-level government officials from Asia, the Middle East, and the United States; representatives from international organizations including the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the International Telecommunication Union; as well as global industry and academic leaders, including OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser; Amazon Chief Global Affairs and Legal Officer David Zapolsky; Trip.com Group CEO Jane Sun; NVIDIA Chief Scientist William Dally; University of Montreal Professor and deep learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio; and University of California, Berkeley Professor Dawn Song, a leading expert in artificial intelligence (AI) safety and trustworthy machine learning.
Finalists from AI Ready ASEAN Youth Challenge and distinguished guests at the Opening Gala Dinner of ATxSummit 2026.
ASEAN Youth Showcase AI Solutions for Public Good
A key highlight of the opening gala dinner was the presentation of 11 youth projects from the inaugural “AI Ready ASEAN Youth Challenge.” In 2024, AI adoption in the ASEAN region reached 85%[1], and these projects demonstrate how ASEAN youth are leveraging AI technology to create practical solutions that benefit society. The competition selected 11 finalists from over 600 entries across all ASEAN member states, covering fields such as healthcare, education, social inclusion, and agriculture, all aimed at improving livelihoods and strengthening communities.
Singapore President Tharman Shanmugaratnam awarded the champion, runner-up, and second runner-up prizes to teams from Brunei, Cambodia, and Myanmar, respectively, whose innovative applications aligned with the competition’s three core pillars: Knowledge, Skills, and Learning; Scientific Progress; and Community Building. The overall champion, Brunei’s team ΣHAI, developed an AI dementia care platform that enables early screening, personalized care guidance, and care coordination through voice, language, and video analysis. Cambodia’s team Voha.ai uses real-time speech recognition and visual lip-tracking technology to help hearing-impaired children improve their pronunciation. Myanmar’s team Future Flux launched an edge-computing-driven offline AI education platform, providing digital learning, adaptive curricula, and AI tutoring for rural students. The three teams received prizes of $5,000, $3,000, and $1,000, respectively.
Koo Sengmeng, Director of Talent and Ecosystem at AI Singapore, said: “This is exactly the impact we hoped to achieve through the ‘AI Ready ASEAN’ initiative—the younger generation not only understands the principles of AI technology but also knows its value, its application scenarios, and how to use technology to improve lives.”
The ΣHAI team stated: “Through the Sahabat-Care platform, we aim to address the growing challenges of dementia screening and caregiver support in Southeast Asia. This platform helps us explore how AI can provide caregivers with more timely insights, personalized guidance, and better decision-making for elderly care.”
The AI Ready ASEAN Youth Challenge is co-organized by AI Singapore (AISG) and the ASEAN Foundation, with support from Google.org and co-hosting by IMDA. It is a key component of the “AI Ready ASEAN” initiative, which aims to equip 5.5 million people with basic AI literacy and skills. The competition, themed “AI for an Inclusive and Sustainable ASEAN,” called for AI solutions from youth aged 18-35, focusing on the three areas of Knowledge, Skills, and Learning; Scientific Progress; and Community Building, with all solutions required to be implemented and reach at least 1,000 community members.
AI-Driven Medical Research and Solutions
On the eve of the summit, the SingHealth AI Healthcare Symposium was held at Capella Singapore, where two memorandums of understanding (MOUs) were signed to advance AI medical research and accelerate solutions that benefit patients and healthcare systems. Southeast Asia’s aging population, rising chronic disease burden, and uneven distribution of healthcare resources are putting pressure on medical systems, and AI is addressing this challenge by optimizing clinical decision-making, supporting healthcare workers, and expanding access to quality care:
- SingHealth signed an MOU with the Gyalpozhing College of Information Technology (GCIT) under the Royal University of Bhutan to promote the responsible use of AI in healthcare, focusing on localized solutions for emerging healthcare systems. The core of the collaboration is an AI chest X-ray diagnostic model built on MerMED-FM (a multimodal, multi-specialty medical imaging foundation model jointly developed by the SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medical Centre and A*STAR’s Institute of High Performance Computing). The model’s results were published in The Lancet Digital Health, demonstrating strong performance in detecting pneumonia, tuberculosis, liver space-occupying lesions, and colorectal cancer. The model will be trained on local Bhutanese data and is expected to be fully deployed in Bhutan’s “Gelephu Mindfulness City” healthcare system by 2027, providing expert-level diagnostic capabilities to rural areas constrained by geography and a shortage of radiology specialists, underscoring SingHealth’s vision to transform diagnostic care in the region.
- Singapore General Hospital (SGH), SingHealth’s flagship hospital and Singapore’s largest public healthcare cluster, signed an MOU with A*STAR’s Diagnostics Development Hub (DxD Hub) to accelerate the commercialization of AI multimodal precision diagnostics. The partnership will rapidly advance the development of commercially viable diagnostic tools, covering areas such as antimicrobial resistance infection detection and early memory decline screening in the elderly, with plans to incubate investable enterprises that deliver both health and economic benefits for Singapore and the world.
For more information about ATxSG, please visit the official website: asiatechxsg.com
[1] The 11th ASEAN Economic Community Dialogue Survey, see: asean.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/ASEAN-for-Business-Bulletin-Special-Edition.pdf