Life at HTX: Meet young officers thriving in science and AI

“As a team, we all understood the challenge and encouraged one another not to give up,” she says.

Following the Myanmar operation, they persisted for months in a continuous cycle of trial and refinement based on operational feedback, until they found a wireless technology that worked better.

Mentorship and autonomy are also key drivers of innovation at HTX.

As part of HTX’s Associate Programme, Ms Aw was mentored by her deputy director on a self-conceptualised Greenfield Project, a key requirement of the programme.

She designed an automation system for the Central Narcotics Bureau to replace the labour-intensive exhibit photo-taking task, where officers would manually photograph hundreds of evidence items for up to 15 hours at a stretch.

Guidance from her deputy director aside, she led the project and steadily handled various technical tasks. “I had the opportunity to take ownership of the innovation process,” she says.

Ms Aw is now working on an embodied AI mobile manipulator, where she integrates multimodal systems into a robot so it can respond to natural language commands, identify objects without prior training and execute complex tasks.

This could support operations such as police patrols, where officers may need a robot to assess a scene quickly and identify potentially dangerous objects.

“I find it fulfilling to know that my engineering skills will contribute directly to public safety,” she says. “This aligns with my personal goal to use my technical skills for meaningful work.”

What sets HTX apart from other science and tech agencies, in Ms Aw’s view, is the agency’s willingness to embrace uncertainty and failure as part of the process.

“If we realise that the path that we are taking may not be the best, we take it as lessons learnt and move ahead in seeking better solutions,” she says.

That mindset is reflected in HTX’s Undaunted Award, which recognises officers who test new ideas even when they do not succeed.

Ms Aw, who is heartened by such incentives, adds: “We are still recognised for our effort and courage to even try.”

Mr Clarence Teo, 27, never expected that having a linguistics degree would lead him to join the field of engineering. But at HTX, that specialised skill turned out to be exactly what was needed.

As an engineer in the Language AI Development team under HTX’s AI R&D xData group, Mr Teo works with colleagues from different disciplines to help machines understand Singaporean lingo.

“We build language AI capabilities that can understand and speak in Singapore’s colloquial languages,” he says. “This is necessary because everyday speech in Singapore is layered with accents, dialects such as Hokkien and Teochew, and informal expressions.”

The AI agent is already being used by multiple teams across the Home Team, including in tools that support police work, such as transcribing interviews and other spoken interactions for police records.

“We have different registers of Singapore English,” says Mr Teo. “Sometimes, the police officers use a lower register – a more colloquial form of the way we speak. And there are insertions of dialect words into their sentences.”

In front-line settings, capturing speech accurately can reduce miscommunication and give officers clearer information to respond effectively.

Mr Teo is also working on a community engagement robot that can detect its audience’s age and play appropriate crime prevention videos, for instance. It may be deployed at all police headquarters across Singapore.

At university, Mr Teo specialised in computational linguistics, focusing on how language can be modelled through computer science. He had intended to pursue postgraduate studies, but an internship at HTX changed his mind.

“They needed someone with linguistic expertise to help solve language problems in an engineering-dominated environment,” he recalls. “That drew me in. I was always interested in using my skills on projects that went beyond the classroom or laboratory, where I could see real use cases in action.”

To strengthen his specialist knowledge in generative speech technologies, Mr Teo has taken sponsored courses in deep learning and AI deployment. He also signed up for HTX’s multiple learning paths, which include free Udemy courses and regular engagement with industry experts, such as Google developers.

“The training programmes in HTX are quite comprehensive,” he says. “They allow me to continuously upskill myself throughout my time here.”

Being involved in major HTX events is another way Mr Teo has enriched himself. As part of the organising committee for the upcoming Milipol TechX Summit (MTX) 2026, a convention that gathers global industry experts and thought leaders to exchange ideas on public safety, he leads the developer zone featuring innovations from across HTX.

MTX will be held at Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre from Apr 28 to 30. The experience has given him a broader view of how different teams apply AI to operational needs.

Mr Teo has also benefited from overseas work trips. In 2025, he attended Interspeech in Rotterdam, one of the world’s leading conferences in speech technology.

“It was unreal to be there in person,” he says. “I was learning from and exchanging ideas with researchers behind the papers I used to read in university.”

Apart from the space to grow professionally, Mr Teo values the sense of connection at HTX. He has bonded with colleagues through company-wide activities such as movie screenings, as well as through Communities of Interest, self-initiated groups that bring together staff from across divisions over shared hobbies.

He and a colleague recently started a Coffee Community of Interest for fellow enthusiasts.

“What I appreciate is that people here genuinely make time to connect, whether it is through organised activities or something as simple as having a coffee together,” he adds.