Charting Singapore's maritime future with AI solutions

This MPA scholar is pioneering the next wave of innovation at sea and across the globe

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For four months each year, employees from the shipping department at the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA) examine over 12,000 statutory certificates – essential documents to keep vessels registered under the Singapore Registry of Ships – mostly manually.

Foo Chi Jao was surprised to learn of such tiresome work processes when he joined MPA in 2020. While Singapore may be one of the world’s most advanced ports, the global shipping industry remains surprisingly heavily reliant on paper.

“I did not realise that the maritime industry was not very technologically advanced. I thought these processes would have been fully automated years ago,” says the 29-year-old.

As an assistant senior data analyst in the statistics and data systems department, these tedious and repetitive processes presented him with a perfect opportunity for transformation. The result: one of the Singapore Government’s first public-facing artificial intelligence (AI) solutions that uses large language models (LLMs).

Previous attempts to automate the process using conventional document-scanning tools saw a decline in performance over time – their accuracy would plummet whenever documents deviated from standard templates which changed throughout the years.