The Captain - Jean-Luc Lebrun

In 1993, I succeeded Dr. George White as Manager of the Apple-ISS research center. Apple-ISS was created in 1992 to conduct research in Singapore as part of a five year contract between Apple and EDB. The research targeted Chinese Text-to-Speech, Chinese Handwritten character recognition, and Chinese Speech recognition, as Apple intended to expand its business in China.

As manager, I hired talented researchers, prepared the yearly research budgets, wrote progress reports, set up board meetings, and supported the researchers to achieve our goals within the five years allotted to the research joint venture. We did well in handwriting and speech recognition where our efforts were recognized by several research awards, patents and commercial products. We would have done well also in the Chinese Text-to-Speech research but for the accidental death of Dr Choi, head of the the TTS research group.

The contract between Apple and EDB was not renewed in 1997 because Apple’s worldwide business was in free fall due to the competition of the IBM PC. Apple had to abandon its focus on the Chinese market to recenter it on the core markets. So, I returned to Apple in July 1997. But Apple closed its Advanced Technology Group in September 1997. So I came back to Singapore as General Manager of TechISS, a post previously occupied by Dr. Virginia Cha. When ISS changed to become Kent Ridge Digital Labs (KRDL), I hired and headed a group of business catalysts to commercialize KRDL’s research, I also created a business communication department, and a business intelligence unit.

Managing Apple-ISS was a unique experience. I rapidly understood that the most important duty of a manager is to facilitate research by identifying and addressing roadblocks as soon as possible. A roadblock can be cultural, staff replacement, a missing resource (computer or data for example), a research impasse. I also understood that progress in research is not a function of time, but a function of empowerment and teamwork. I also discovered that quality of research is not a function of manpower, but a function of creativity and willingness to try out new things when dissatisfied. Finally, I discovered that any research team should have a User experience (UX) expert in its midst serving as guide, and a top-notch software engineer to rapidly create intermediary prototypes that help visualize the progress made.

I left Singapore at the end of 1999 to go to Cambodia with my family as a partner of Overseas Missionary Fellowship (OMF). But during that time, I also served as training consultant for KRDL. Two of these trainings, scientific writing and scientific communication, became popular, and were requested by several A*STAR institutes outside the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), which was formed from KRDL, the original IT institute. Training later expanded to the whole of A*STAR. With Justin Lebrun, I created the Scientific Reach partnership to deliver scientific communication training worldwide (https://scientificreach.com). Our clients are Doctoral schools in Europe, Research institutes and universities in Singapore. Because of COVID, we successfully ported our writing and presenting trainings to the online Moodle platform.