Source StraitsTimes
THE Government is planning a multimillion-dollar upgrade of a high-tech early warning system designed to help spot crises such as the current global financial meltdown.
Known as a risk assessment and horizon scanning (Rahs) system, it is designed to ferret out information about impending wars, epidemics, financial meltdowns and other geo-political issues from information sources including newspapers, online forums and blogs.
Sophisticated artificial intelligence programs then distil the data to see if it is important and if the issue is gaining momentum.
If it is, these Rahs systems will alert policymakers, so they can 'anticipate and manage potential changes', said Deputy Prime Minister and Coordinating Minister for National Security, Professor S. Jayakumar, the guest-of-honour at the second International Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning (Rahs) symposium on Monday.
For instance, Rahs systems may detect a rise in online forum discussions about easy home loans accompanied by mortgage defaults - the genesis of the current financial turmoil; or reports about a rise in melamine sales to the milk industry, in tandem with complaints of kidney stones by parents of infants - and end up uncovering the China milk scandal.
In his opening address to the 300 participants of the two-day, closed-door event at Marina Mandarin hotel, Prof Jayakumar warned that the ongoing sub-prime mortgage crisis and food and energy shortages offered 'only a glimpse of the complexity and uncertainty the future has in store'.
Thus the need for such systems, so policymakers can collect and analyse the oft-missed 'weak signals and wild cards' that herald an impending crisis, and take steps to deal with them, he said.
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