Research and development
R& D wil l be done and we support them through research grants. Currently we have awarded 26 research grants for research projects done by the universities. Looking at all the research initiatives, we also found out that they don’t have any industry- grade tools.
“That’s where the Open Lab comes in. The Open Lab is a centre where the big technology partners will come and provide the tools there. Students from universities can come in and use it for free to develop their products and services. It is part of the government initiative to enable universities to do their research and also commercialisation.”
“This is one way that the whole ecosystem on how the partners can support the Open Lab and also move to the commercialisation and also the project deployment. The platform and tools will be funded by industry partners while we will provide them with the physical location and also the infrastructure. With that, we also provide the R& D scholarship for postgraduate students.”
The Open Lab will be at the Centre of Technical Excellence Sarawak (Centexs) in Santubong. Aside from the five local universities, SMA is also getting world class partners such as University of Malaya and National University of Singapore to come onboard. For industry partners, SMA has six partners: IBM, Huawei, Fusionex, GE, Keysight and Honeywell.
“We are getting them as partners to provide tools in the Open Lab so that researchers can use whatever tools that they provide. Example for AI purposes, universities, researchers can come in and use the IBM Watson to develop their data analytics, algorithm or their apps.”
On the testbeds, Khairul highlighted that these will be like a living lab, a working environment where people can come in to test their components or their products and services.
“Currently, there are five testbeds that are being planned. Industry 4.0 is one of them, along with agriculture, smart city, fintech and cybersecurity. We will have this living lab at the economic areas such as for smart city, maybe it will be in Kuching, Industry 4.0 maybe in Bintulu, where the economic sectors dominate.
“Basically the living lab is a real working environment for manufacturingbutif anyvendors or companies or researchers want to test out any components in the industry 4.0, then they can do that in the testbeds. They can test the products. Let’s say some companies might want to test their sensors that they have developed, they can just put their sensors in there and test it in a real working environment.”