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projectVAS innovates by bringing together key technologies across the government cloud service provider onto a single coherent architecture for the implementation of the platform.
This information was sourced from "A Whole of Government Platform for Video Analytics (VAS)" by Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (OECD), https://oecd-opsi.org/innovations/a-whole-of-government-platform-for-video-analytics/. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO).
Our core strategy lies in the opportunity to drive digital transformation across the public service by catalysing the transformation of agency operations and workflows through augmentation with video analytics.
The key goal is to bring together core video analytics functionalities to support and provide agencies with capabilities that can be integrated with agency systems across the public service to derive insights from video sources to facilitate data-driven decision making.
As a platform, VAS provides easy leveraging of AI/ML services from multiple sources while enabling a distributed technology architecture, simplifying access for agencies to be agile in testing and integration of video analytics with in-house systems, so as to bridge the gap between prototyping to deployment and realise benefits from the use of video analytics.
Our overall approach to VAS implementation is three pronged:
VAS differentiates from the competition by providing a user-centric end to end pipeline requiring minimal technical expertise. Built on the government tech stack, it is also compliant to government architecture and security requirements and provides flexibility to leverage across SG Tech Stack component services.
Over 6 public sector agencies have benefited from onboarding to VAS to conduct various studies such as the derivation of relevant insights for policy and operations, such as study of pedestrian movement for better utilization planning and provision of people counting for monitoring the crowdedness of public park lands. Various agencies have also used the service to train custom analytics capabilities for identification of rodents and microorganisms relevant to their operational needs.
The vision for VAS is to continue to grow in scale and capability, by generating synergies in the availability of a stable and secure ecosystem allowing public agencies with video analytics needs, to tap into an expanding spectrum of video analytics capabilities generated both by industry as well as within the public agencies.
VAS innovates by bringing together key technologies across the government cloud service provider onto a single coherent architecture for the implementation of the platform. Various AI/Cognitive, Machine learning services across government cloud providers such as AWS and Azure were used together with the deployment of custom in-house video analytics models both for facilitating model development as well as operational inferencing.
VAS is designed to support secure exchange of video data and metadata allowing greater availability to data on a standardized basis across the organization in a managed and secure way. Based on a common need across agencies to prototype and envision future operational workflows to drive change in operational strategies, VAS also provides user friendly prototyping features as well as security compliant and scalable deployment architecture to allow agencies to develop new custom video analytics capabilities without the need to setup multiple environments.
VAS has been launched for adoption across public agencies as an initial pilot phase at the end of 2020 offering a range of in-house video analytics capabilities. Numerous agencies have been onboarded to use the pilot platform for trials, providing insights to be used for policy development as well as more efficient deployment agency operations.
Based on adoption of the initial implementation, learnings were derived from new agencies use cases and feedback, which continue to be applied in continuous innovation of platform features. The platform is now undergoing a new expansion phase based on agency feedback to enable features addressing wider government use cases in the development and deployment of video analytics models.
Building on industry partnerships, the current phase also introduces new capabilities to meet agencies' needs and expand platform synergies through agencies’ operational integration into VAS, and facilitate wider adoption of video analytics capabilities.
Government officials were continuously involved in the innovation process through identification of use cases, technical solutioning as well as system trials, providing continuous feedback and facilitating development of in-house AI models relevant and aligned to address agency use cases.
Collaborations also involved partnerships with service providers on the government cloud technology stack, such as AWS and Azure, providing close guidance and support on system architecture and implementation.
Several archetypes of government officials were key user beneficiaries:
VAS brings greater cost effectiveness across whole-of-government by allowing multiple agencies to leverage a central platform, avoiding the cost of setting up separate systems, and reaping the benefits of scalability.
The provisioning of VAS allows public agencies to access the same capabilities for less than 50% the outlay compared to if they were to acquire the capabilities individually. With the availability of VAS, multiple agencies have been onboarded for having integrated or performed trials with VAS, translating into cost savings for each agency onboarded.
Agencies on-boarded also see a significant savings in time-to-deploy as they do not need to procure, develop a separate setup from scratch. Results have been measured common product scorecard through metrics indicative of adoption and transactional trends. In future, we expect to deepen partnership with the industry to drive the integration and development of more capabilities to enable platform synergies and drive adoption
A challenge lies in handling disparate video protocols for video management system and data repositories across public sector landscape due to diversity in procurement landscape and differing environments and needs across agencies and their internal teams.
To overcome the challenge, VAS took the approach to harmonize the exchange of video and metadata by providing common standards across public agencies and allowing data to be more consistently accessed for analytics while maintaining government standards for data access.
There is also a need to ensure conformance to government cloud architecture and security requirements as standards are evolving and require adaptation should new architecture or policies be introduced. This is also addressed through the design of VAS as a platform providing a stable foundation, maintained to ensure conformance to government architectural requirements while allowing standardized integrations with other agency systems
Yes, similar types of platforms have been developed for structured data sets in private industry as well as public sector to leverage organisational efficiency in the utilization of AI . The potential in this case lies not in replication of the platform itself but allowance of opportunity for agencies to develop their own innovation in training of custom AI models relevant to their problem sets.
One lesson is the need to drive understanding of the ecosystem, beyond targeted agencies, as approach to drive the feature development process. Particularly with AI innovations, as user maturity evolves with the environment, the team requires agility for integration of new features relevant to new needs arising from agencies. As such, another lesson is the need to retain expertise and control over the core architecture and implementation of core features, while allowing flexibility for features to be integrated from other in-house or partner solutions.
Budget: Not disclosed
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