France and Singapore launch AI lab for cyber defense

The Singaporean Ministry of Defense (Mindef) and the French Ministry of Defense signed an agreement on April 19, 2023, to launch a lab that will develop AI abilities in cyber defense. The CNRS (French Centre for Scientific Research) and Temasek labs from the National University of Singapore will oversee this lab.

“Digital and dual-use technology, such as AI, are rapidly evolving today. By bringing together leading researchers in Singapore and France, we can accelerate research to meet common security challenges,” commented Chan Heng Kee, Permanent Secretary of Defense at Mindef.

This will be the first research center of its kind Mindef establishes with a foreign country. The ministry promises a “global and multidisciplinary approach” to develop defense apps. Among its top-priority projects:

• AI for geospatial analysis;
• natural language processing to extract data for analysis;
• computational vision to monitor image and video streaming.

This lab is part of the SAFARI agreement (Singapore and France Advanced Research Initiative), which was signed in 1997 and provides for cooperation between the two countries in terms of research, science and technology. Moreover this project is an offshoot of the DesCartes artificial intelligence program, launched in 2022 by the CNRS and Singaporean partners.