Keynote Speaker

Dr.Kush Agarwal

Kush is an Indian-born Singaporean innovator, who is a technologist by training, a scientist by profession, and an entrepreneur by DNA, which stems from his early childhood involvement in the family pharmaceutical business. He has created technology business ventures from concept to launch and beyond within friends & family. To date, Kush has co-founded three Singapore based tech-startups through his inventions and is currently leading his A*STAR spin-off company - WaveScan Technologies in the role of CEO. WaveScan is a deep-tech company developing the next generation of AI-powered microwave & millimeter-wave contactless, see-through, radar technology.

He holds a Ph.D. from the National University of Singapore (NUS), an M.S. from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore, and a B.Tech. from College of Engineering Roorkee India, all in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, specializing in component and system-level wireless interfaces. Kush has close to a decade of experience in the R&D & management of wireless technologies and, has authored 25 refereed papers, book chapters, and six patent filings. He is a part of the editorial review committee of over two dozen journals affiliated to IEEE, IET, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, and Springer. Currently, Kush is serving as the Associate Editor for IET Microwaves, Antennas & Propagation, and IET Electronics Letters journals.

Kush is an Executive Committee Member of IEEE Singapore Section, where he chairs and leads the professional activities of IEEE in Singapore. He is affiliated with AP, MTT, ComSoc, IoT, and RFID Societies as a Senior Member of IEEE. Kush has worked with the CGI (Canada), A*STAR, NUS & NTU (Singapore), and is actively involved in supporting and building the tech-startup ecosystem in the Asia-Pacific region in his role of 2019 IEEE Entrepreneurship Steering Committee. He firmly believes in teamwork and that, private-public entities will have to collectively work towards shared sustainable strategies, incentives, and a value system as we strive to transform human lives with disruptive technologies to improve the current state of the world and build a competitive, yet healthy & productive future for our younger generation.

Title: AI‐powered, see‐through, contactless radar technology ‐ Building a resilient, sustainable & safer city in Singapore & beyond

Abstract:

Inspection industry has been relying on contact-based technologies like ultrasonic (UT) & eddy current testing for decades. These technologies need couplant/contact to interface with the device under test (DUT) for highresolution scanning, and hence make the process tedious, costly & most of the times inaccessible. The consequence – lack of timely inspections leading to unsafe infrastructure & assets. At WaveScan, we have developed a first‐of‐its‐kind millimeter‐scale resolution, non‐contact imaging technology that uses electromagnetic waves to penetrate through materials for see-through imaging. This new inspection technology has already been demonstrated for non-destructive testing (NDT) applications such as infrastructure, oil & gas pipelines/storage tanks and shipping vessels inspection. WaveScan's millimeter‐wave scanners are also integrable on drones & unmanned ground vehicles to conduct the automated inspection at large scale structures & hard‐to‐access remote locations.
During this talk, I will share about our Singapore's technology-entrepreneurship ecosystem and the work we are doing to encourage & back the deep‐tech scientific driven startups. As WaveScan is a spin-off company from Singapore's national research agency ‐ A*STAR, I'll also discuss the path we took to productize our decade long lab research for commercialization. Singapore, being one of the most innovative countries in the world, has always been a trailblazer in taking the first steps towards disruptive innovation. At WaveScan, we've been awarded a few competitive R&D startup grants by government agencies like Enterprise Singapore, National Research Foundation (NRF) and SGInnovate to further our innovative technology. I will share about WaveScan's projects with different inspection partners and use cases in Singapore, Japan & Europe, primarily with shipping vessels and Oil & gas container clients.