Just yesterday, on the 23rd of July, SAP Research in Singapore organized an event promoting work of several university and polytechnic students who stayed with us as interns for a couple of months. I was there, together with dozens of guests, both from the SAP ecosystem as well as from the Singaporean academia. Below is my personal account of the event, and I am sharing it with you in order to get you excited about joining one of such events in future (disclaimer: I am a research manager at SAP Research Singapore).
If you have never interacted with SAP Research, there may be a few things that will surprise you. We work on both extending and enhancing existing SAP products and solutions, as well as exploring completely new fields. We need to be looking very broadly at the space of enterprise software in order to ensure SAP does not miss a developing trend. On the other hand, we strongly value research projects that can quickly turn into custom solutions or products, for the benefit of SAP customers and partners. As you may imagine, it is fairly tricky to maintain the right balance. But, hey, that's part of the fun!
The sole purpose of the Expo was to demonstrate the work of the students staying with us at SAP Research. No bombastic research strategy pitches, no overwhelming research portfolio presentations, no lengthy discussions on the innovation models we apply. Just pure content: code, demos, idea exchange. The event was mostly organized by the students - yes, it was their internship project as well - with some support from the more senior staff in Singapore.
After the keynotes given by SAP Research VP Karsten Schulz and SAP University Alliances Regional Director Crispian Tan, the students gave elevator pitches of their projects (we initially wanted to do a Demo Jam, but the amount of stress involved, especially for the students, made us decide on pure elevator pitches). Afterwards the students retreated to their demo booths to start giving demos and discuss their projects with anyone interested.
There were ten projects featured during the expo, each with a team of two students (on average, there were exceptions) and an SAP Research supervisor. I don't want to go into every detail of the projects here, but I thought you might find it useful to at least get an overview what was presented, and so we had:
- SBN Questionnaire Plus+: a survey management system for capturing sustainability related information (linked to a sustainability reporting solution);
- sRadar: a real time anomaly detection system for moving objects, featuring an AIS receiver monitoring movement of all the boats in the port of Singapore and - all of it happening live - alerting us on any suspicious (or otherwise anomalous) activities of the boats;
- sRadar HANA: a component of sRadar created specifically to manage spatio-temporal (i.e. containing time and location) data streams, including complex event processing and analytics;
- sRadar methodology: one of the "non-technical" projects, sharing the methodology we applied in the particular research project - how we closely worked with potential customers and partners in order to quickly deliver a working prototype;
- A mobile driven solution for SCM - SCM view: enabling retail businesses to interact directly with the in-store customers;
- A mobile driven solution for SCM - customer view: a mobile, social-enabled, app for shopping, collaborative shopping, self-check out, and product reviews;
- Quantum computing: a study-focused project, exploring the applications of quantum computing in business applications;
- A tool for knowledge abstraction, retention and integration (KARI) - an interactive system to manage knowledge maps and share them with others;
- Data Stream Market Place: a prototype system providing publish/subscribe services for developers, including feed usage analytics and monetizing;
- IdeaWall Android: a port of IdeaWall, real-whiteboard sharing and capturing iPhone application, to the Android platform.
The students were very excited to share their work with others. Some of the projects will continue at SAP Research after the students leave, proving that innovative ideas can be brought in by everyone. I was also very excited to be there at the expo (especially as I was personally supervising/mentoring some of the students), and was glad to see their work being shown in a spotlight. We had a few SCN members visiting us (special thanks to jansirani.murugesan - SCN member of the month - for making it!), and let's hope that during future events we are going to organize, even more members of the SCN community in Singapore will decide to join us and learn more about our work.
If you are interested in learning more about any of the projects listed above, please reach out to me!
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