Singapore, May 19, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — ATxSummit 2026Sponsored by Singapore Information and Communication Media Development Authority, It officially opened this evening with Singapore President Tharman Shanmugaratnam as the guest of honor at the opening gala dinner held at Gardens by the Bay. This year’s ATxSummit will bring together government leaders from Asia, the Middle East, and the United States. International organizations such as the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), as well as Dennis Dresser, Chief Revenue Officer of OpenAI, David Zapolsky, Chief International Affairs and Legal Officer of Amazon, Jane Sun, CEO of Trip.com Group, William Daly, Principal Research Scientist, NVIDIA; It includes prominent figures from industry and academia, including Professor Bengio. Professor Dawn Song of the University of California, Berkeley, known for her research in deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI) security and trusted machine learning.
Finalists of the AI Ready ASEAN Youth Challenge and distinguished guests of the ATxSummit 2026 Opening Gala Dinner.
ASEAN youth Introducing solutions for society that utilize AI
TA highlight of this year’s gala dinner was the showcase of 11 youth projects from the 1st AI Ready ASEAN Youth Challenge. AI adoption rate across the region will reach 85% by 2024[1]these projects demonstrated how ASEAN youth are shaping practical AI solutions for the public good. The 11 projects shortlisted from over 600 applications across ASEAN member states spanned healthcare, education, social inclusion and agriculture, with a common objective of improving lives and strengthening communities.
PMr Thurman, a resident, presented the top three awards to teams from Brunei, Cambodia and Myanmar. Its innovative applications were matched by challenges focused on knowledge, skills, learning, scientific advancement, and stronger communities. Overall winner ΣHAI from Brunei developed an AI-powered dementia care platform using voice, language and video analytics to support early detection, personalized caregiver guidance and care coordination. Cambodia’s Voha.ai helps deaf children improve their pronunciation through real-time speech recognition and visual mouth tracking. Future Flux in Myanmar provides an offline AI education platform powered by edge computing, delivering digital learning, adaptive lessons, and AI tutoring to rural students. These winners received prizes of USD 5,000, USD 3,000, and USD 1,000, respectively.
K“This is the kind of impact we hope to have from the AI Ready ASEAN initiative,” said Wu Sengmen, director of talent and ecosystem at AI Singapore. “Our future generations will not only know how AI works, but where it matters, where they should use it, and how it can improve their lives.”
Σhighsaid, “Through Sahabbat Care, we wanted to address the growing challenge of dementia detection and caregiver support in Southeast Asia. This platform helped us explore how AI can support caregivers with more timely insights, personalized guidance, and better decision-making for elder care.”
TThe AI Ready ASEAN Youth Challenge is a regional ideathon organized by AI Singapore (AISG) in collaboration with the ASEAN Foundation, supported by Google.org, and organized in collaboration with the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA). This is part of the AI Ready ASEAN initiative to equip 5.5 million people with basic AI literacy and competency. Themed “AI for an Inclusive and Sustainable ASEAN,” the challenge called on young people aged 18 to 35 to develop AI-based solutions across three priority areas: knowledge, skills and learning, scientific advancement, and stronger communities. Each proposal had to demonstrate real-world application, including support for at least 1,000 community members.
Healthcare research and solutions using AI
EEarlier in the day, two Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) were signed at the SingHealth AI in Health Symposium held at Capella, Singapore, a pre-event of ATxSummit 2026. These MoUs will advance AI-powered healthcare research and accelerate solutions for patients and health systems. These reflect the need for scalable solutions given how aging populations, increasing burden of chronic diseases, and unequal access to care are putting pressure on health systems across Southeast Asia. It also shows how AI is responding to this call to enhance clinical decision-making, support healthcare professionals, and deliver quality care to more patients.
- SingHealth and Royal University of Bhutan Gyalpozin College of Information Technology (GCIT) have signed a memorandum of understanding to promote the responsible use of AI in healthcare, focusing on localized solutions for emerging health systems. At the heart of this collaboration is an AI-assisted chest radiography model powered by MerMED-FM, a multimodal, multidisciplinary medical imaging infrastructure model developed by SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medicine Center and A*STAR’s Institute for High Performance Computing. The model, published in The Lancet Digital Health, has shown excellent performance in detecting pneumonia, tuberculosis, liver masses, and colorectal cancer. Trained on Bhutanese data and scheduled to be rolled out across Bhutan’s Gelehuhu Mindfulness City Healthcare Hospital in 2027, the model demonstrates SingHealth’s ambition to transform diagnostic care in the region, bringing expert-level diagnostic capabilities to rural areas where geographic barriers and lack of radiology expertise remain pressing challenges.
- Singapore General Hospital (SGH), the flagship hospital of SingHealth, Singapore’s largest public healthcare cluster, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)’s Diagnostic Development Hub (DxD Hub) to accelerate AI-enabled multimodal high-precision diagnostics into market-ready solutions. The partnership has the ambition to rapidly develop commercially scalable diagnostic tools, from combating antibiotic-resistant infections to detecting early memory loss in the elderly, and spin off investable companies that will deliver health and economic impact in Singapore and beyond.
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Source Singapore Information and Communication Media Development Authority
