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SINGAPORE — Singapore Post (SingPost) on Friday (Sept 27) rejected claims that its newly-unveiled prototype of a smart letterbox was plagiarised from university undergraduates, saying that it began developing the prototype a month before the students approached SingPost for assistance.
On Tuesday, SingPost showed reporters the prototype of a smart letterbox system and demonstrated how it works.
Besides dispensing mail after a quick scan by a recipient’s ez-link card or Quick Response (QR) code, the letterbox can also sort out mail for households in an apartment block.
Postal workers would be able to drop the mail for all the residents in that block into a centralised collection panel, and the letterbox would then automatically sort and allocate the mail for each household before alerting the residents who have received mail.
However, on Thursday, Singapore University of Design and Technology (SUTD) graduate Jerry Neo took to LinkedIn to accuse SingPost of plagiarising the idea from a school project he was involved in.
Mr Neo said in his post: “The pathetic state of innovation in Singapore … Where seemingly reputable companies such as SingPost can copy student's project wholesale and claim to be world first.”
“I was fine when the news came out and they did not credit us. I told my team that we have proven ourselves as innovators,” said Mr Neo. His main gripe, however, was when he saw in news reports that “they claimed to be (the) world's first”.
In response to the allegations, a SingPost spokesperson told TODAY by email that it disagreed with the claims Mr Neo made.
SingPost said that work on developing the smart letterbox had commenced in January this year, a month before the Mr Neo and his group approached Singpost for assistance with the project, in February.
It said that Mr Neo’s design “was never used in our iteration process or shared with our prototype vendor” and that the staff whom Mr Neo’s group consulted were also not involved in the designing of the smart letterbox.
“SingPost informed Mr Neo and his group then that we were working on a similar project but were unable to reveal more due to a non-disclosure agreement with our prototype developer, who had already come up with a preliminary smart letterbox design.
“However, SingPost nevertheless hosted Mr Neo and his group to a tour of our sortation and mail processing facility.”
The SingPost spokesperson added that the design and operation of the letterbox Mr Neo designed is “markedly different” from the one SingPost unveiled on Tuesday.
“Key differences include the sortation and storage process which does not use a mechanical arm, the incorporation of tracking capabilities with the data matrix, a fail-safe put-to-light mechanism and the ability to deliver multiple letters to the same storage unit simultaneously.”
SingPost said that despite text exchanges with Mr Neo, they did not receive nor possess his designs. However, it acknowledged that “we could have done better in our communications with Mr Neo and his team to avoid this misunderstanding”.
SingPost said it is arranging a meeting later on Friday with Mr Neo, his group members as well as the professors overseeing his project, to clear the matter up.
TODAY has sought comment from Mr Neo.
Read more at https://www.todayonline.com/singapo...gations-plagiarism-developing-smart-letterbox
