ATxSummit 2026 Officially Opened, Regional Ambitions Drive AI for Public Interest

Singapore, (ANTARA/PRNewswire) - ATxSummit 2026 organised by the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) of Singapore was officially opened this evening with a gala dinner at Gardens by the Bay. President of Singapore Tharman Shanmugaratnam attended as guest of honour. This year ATxSummit brought together government leaders from Asia, the Middle East, and the United States, as well as international organisations such as the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The event was also attended by a number of global industry figures and academics, including Denise Dresser, Chief Revenue Officer of OpenAI; David Zapolsky, Chief Global Affairs & Legal Officer of Amazon; Jane Sun, CEO of Trip.com Group; William Dally, Chief Scientist at NVIDIA; Yoshua Bengio, deep learning pioneer from the University of Montreal; and Professor Dawn Song from the University of California, Berkeley, known for research on AI safety and trustworthy machine learning.

ASEAN’s Youth Generation Demonstrates AI Solutions for Society

As one of the main highlights during the dinner this year, youths from AI Ready ASEAN Youth Challenge inaugural edition showcased 11 projects. With ASEAN AI adoption reaching 85% in 2024, these projects demonstrate the momentum of ASEAN’s younger generation who are beginning to harness AI to address a range of social issues. Of more than 600 proposals from all ASEAN member states, 11 projects were selected as winners. The projects span health, education, social inclusion, and agriculture with the aim of raising living standards and empowering communities.

President Tharman presented the top prize to teams from Brunei, Cambodia, and Myanmar presenting AI innovations in education, skills development, scientific advancement, and community empowerment. The ΣHAI team from Brunei emerged as overall champions with an AI-based dementia care platform that uses voice, language, and video analysis for early detection, personalised guidance for caregivers, and coordination of care services. Meanwhile, Voha.ai from Cambodia helps children with hearing impairment to improve pronunciation using real-time speech recognition technology and mouth movement tracking. From Myanmar, the Future Flux team presented an offline AI education platform based on edge computing to provide digital learning, adaptive materials, and AI tutor services for students in rural areas. The three winners received prizes of USD 5,000, USD 3,000, and USD 1,000 respectively.

Director, Talent & Ecosystem, AI Singapore, Koo Sengmeng, said, ‘AI Ready ASEAN programme not only trains the younger generation to understand how AI works, but also to master the use of AI that is appropriate and has real-world impact for society.’

ΣHAI team said, ‘The Sahabat-Care platform addresses dementia detection and helps carers in Southeast Asia. AI helps carers access information more quickly, provide more personalised guidance, and make better decisions in elder care.’

AI Ready ASEAN Youth Challenge is a regional ideas competition run by AI Singapore (AISG) with the ASEAN Foundation, supported by Google.org with IMDA collaboration. The competition is part of the AI Ready ASEAN initiative aimed at increasing AI literacy and basic AI capabilities for 5.5 million people in the region. Under the theme ‘AI for an Inclusive and Sustainable ASEAN’, the competition invites young people aged 18–35 to create AI solutions in three core areas: education and skills, scientific advancement, and community empowerment. Each proposal must demonstrate tangible impact for at least 1,000 members of a community.

AI Collaboration for Health Research and Services

Earlier, on the same day, two memoranda of understanding (MoUs) were signed during SingHealth AI in Health Symposium at Capella Singapore as a pre-event for ATxSummit 2026. The collaboration aims to accelerate AI-based health research and the development of health service solutions for patients and health systems. The collaboration is considered important given Southeast Asian countries face challenges of ageing populations, rising chronic diseases, and uneven access to healthcare. AI is seen as capable of assisting clinical decision-making, supporting healthcare workers, and expanding access to high-quality healthcare.

SingHealth and Gyalpozhing College of Information Technology (GCIT), Royal University of Bhutan, signed an MoU to promote responsible AI use in the health sector, particularly for health service systems in developing countries. The collaboration develops an AI model for chest X-ray analysis based on MerMED-FM, a multimodal, multi-specialist medical imaging foundation model developed by the SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medicine Centre in partnership with the Institute of High Performance Computing of A*STAR. Published in The Lancet Digital Health, the model has proven capable of detecting pneumonia, tuberculosis, liver masses, and colorectal cancer. The model was trained with data from Bhutan and is targeted to be deployed from 2027 at Gelephu Mindfulness City Healthcare Hospitals in Bhutan. This technology is expected to deliver specialist-level diagnostic capability for rural populations that face limited access and radiology personnel, reflecting SingHealth’s ambition to transform diagnostic services at a regional level.

Singapore General Hospital (SGH), the flagship hospital of SingHealth and part of Singapore’s largest public healthcare cluster, signed an MoU with the Diagnostics Development Hub (DxD Hub) of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR). The collaboration aims to accelerate the development of precision diagnostic solutions based on