SAP and ASEAN Foundation launch new initiative to boost vision 2025

Since inception in 1967 between Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has expanded to include Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam. Together, ASEAN members aim to accelerate economic growth and development.

Turning 50 his year the ASEAN Foundation is working with strategic partners to establish several new initiatives centred around building a sense of ASEAN identity. The first of these is the “ASEAN Data Science Explorers” (ASEAN DSE).

The ASEAN DSE is a regional competition jointly organised with SAP, the market leader in enterprise application software. It encourages ASEAN tertiary students from any discipline in all ten member states to harness the power of data, highlighting the key issues in ASEAN and derive meaningful insights that lead to innovative solutions.

Titled “Today’s Youth for Tomorrow’s World”, this competition will allow all ASEAN youths to play a key role in tackling today’s social issues facing the region and help create positive change for a better future.

By using the SAP BusinessObjects Cloud tool, the initiative encourages participants to deliver data-driven insights which highlight issues in ASEAN across six United Nation Sustainable Development Goals, namely;

1. Good health and well-being
2. Quality education
3. Gender equality
4. Clean water and sanitation
5. Decent work and economic growth
6. Sustainable cities and communities

Competitors will be judged along the lines of four key criteria; Visualization, Data, a Compelling story, and User experience. Through visual analysis, compelling charts and graphs, competitors must depict the datasets and give viewers meaningful insights. Volume, variety and relevance of data used to support themes are important, along with the design and creative layout of storyboards. Competitors must also be able to “Wow” judges in total user experience.

SAP Business Objects Cloud is a new generation of Software as a Service (SaaS) that redefines analytics in the cloud by providing Business Intelligence (BI), predictive, and planning capabilities in one solution. Built on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform, it allows customers to simplify access to a new public cloud experience that they can trust.

Through this initiative, it is also hoped that a competitive effort will produce better quality results towards the realisation of the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community Blueprint 2025 vision of creating an ASEAN community that engages and benefits the people, and is inclusive, sustainable, resilient and dynamic.

The competition will be organised in all 10 ASEAN Member States in October, with winners of the respective in-country competitions going into a regional final that will take place in Jakarta, Indonesia in November this year.

Students can find out more about the competition and register online via the ASEAN DSE’s official website: www.aseandse.org. The registration portal is open until 16 June 2017.