INTRO Events

INTRO at the Inaugural NUS-SME Conference
About 400 participants gathered at Grand Copthorne Waterfront hotel to attend the Inaugural NUS-SME conference on 11 November 2003, organized by the NUS Business School.

INTRO organized a signing ceremony during the conference, which saw NUS, together with 5 companies, sign agreements to license NUS technologies for their commercial use. The companies include:

• Cyclect Holdings Pte Ltd - Adsorption Chiller, the technology uses waste heat (such as process, solar, and turbine) to generate cooling power. Inventors of this technology include Assistant Professor Chua Hui Tong, Associate Professor Ng Kim Choon, Dr. Abdul Malek, Dr. B. Saha Bidyut and Professor Takao Kashiwagi.

• Brooklyn Media - Real time mixed reality software, the technology enables the real-time merging of physical and virtual worlds in an interactive gaming environment. Inventors of the technology include Dr. Adrian Cheok, Goh Kok Hwee, Liu Wei and Dr Farzam Farbiz.

• DecisionWare Simulations & Games Pte Ltd – MAGNUS, this is a computer simulation game with information systems support, for training decision making in business. The inventor of this technology is Associate Professor Yeo Gee Kin.

• Biomimetico Pte Ltd - Supported Liquid Membranes (SLM). SLM allows a higher degree of purification than reverse osmosis, at a fraction of the cost. Applied in the PCB industry, 99.99% of copper can be recovered from etching solutions. The technology is invented by Associate Professor Nikolai Kocherginsky and Dr. Andrew Grishchenko.

• RidgeWave Technologies Pte Ltd - Document compression. The technology improves document accessibility, increases productivity and cuts cost. This new document management solution helps to compress data file size, enabling swift delivery over networks. Dr Xia Tao and Liu Chao Qiang are the inventors of this technology.

INTRO also set up a booth to showcase NUS technologies that are ready for commercialization, and to answer queries regarding collaborations, patenting and licensing of NUS technology. There was keen interest among the Conference participants in a number of NUS technologies.

Seminar on The Nuts and Bolts of Commercialising Biomedical Research
INTRO organised this seminar on Nov 17, 2003 to give practical insights into commercialising biomedical research by people who have been there and done that. Guest speakers Prof Casey Chan and Prof Lee Chee Wee shared their experiences on setting up biomedical companies. The enthralled audience spent an eventful afternoon with the speakers, who gave good tips (and lots of humour) in their presentations.

EDB was also present to introduce funding schemes for biomedical research commercialisation.

The presentation slides for this seminar are available at http://www.nus.edu.sg/intro/news_archives.shtml

Seminar on Protecting & Commercialising Intellectual Property in IT
Held at the School of Computing on Dec 11, 2003, this seminar focused on intellectual property protection in IT-related fields.

Wilson Wong, Partner, IP & Technology Department, Allen & Gledhill, shared his knowledge and experience in Copyright Protection of Computer Programs. Dr Timothy L. Watkin, Partner, Lloyd Wise, Singapore gave a thorough explanation on What is Patentable in IT. And Dr Lai Kok Fung (left), Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder, BuzzCity Pte Ltd spoke with great passion on Positioning a Company’s Intellectual Property for Success in the Real World.

The presentation slides for this seminar are available at http://www.nus.edu.sg/intro/news_archives.shtml

Roundtable Discussion on Stem Cell
Initiated by INTRO, and co-organised with Office of Life Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Exploit Technologies, the informal session on Oct 27, 2003 involved staff from both NUS (primarily researchers from the Faculty of Medicine) and A*STAR giving short presentations on their current research, as well as engaging in informal discussions.

More than 30 researchers attended this event. The discussion was well received, and a number of researchers requested that more of such meetings be organized in the future.

Roundtable Discussion on Hydrogen-related Technologies
13 participants representing NUS, NTU, and A*STAR researchers and technology transfer professionals met over light refreshments on Monday 24 Nov in the INTRO Conference Room to find out what each other was doing, and to discuss ways of synergizing efforts in this area. Spear-headed by INTRO, and supported by NTU’s Innovation & Technology Transfer Office and A*STAR’s Exploit Technologies, this gathering was the first time many of the researchers were discussing their research with each other.

After more than 2 hours of presentations and discussions, during which research suggestions and leads were freely shared, participants left with a much better understanding of potentially complementary research in others’ labs. They also resolved to maintain the contact so that opportunities for future collaboration could be more easily taken advantage of. A more formal grouping of researchers involved in clean energy research was also proposed.