Marking student essays is one of education's most laborious tasks. Teachers in Singapore spend an average of 6.4 hours a week grading, about a third of the 17.7 hours they devote to actual teaching. This leaves limited time to deliver the detailed, individualised feedback students need, according to the Teaching and Learning International Survey released in October 2025.
Recognising this, a team from the National University of Singapore (NUS) has developed Remarkably, an AI-powered platform that automates essay grading and provides personalised feedback at scale. It uses optical character recognition (OCR) and natural language processing to analyse handwritten scripts, shortening grading time to just over two hours per class while highlighting specific errors and tailored improvement for each student.
According to the team, the platform is trained on the nation's education standards and adapts to each school's marking criteria. Teachers can review and edit all AI-generated comments before releasing feedback. Remarkably's OCR engine can reliably read any physically legible handwriting, using context to distinguish similar characters.
Remarkably was named the winner of the Onwards Entrepreneurship track at Huawei's Tech4City Competition 2025, receiving $20,000 cash prize.
Now in its fourth edition, the Tech4City Competition calls for technology-driven solutions across Smart Healthcare, Smart Education and Smart City themes under the banner "Empowering Our Shared Digital Future." It aligns with the city-state's Smart Nation 2.0, National AI Strategy 2.0 and Green Plan 2030. More than 120 submissions came in from over 15 schools this year.
The Onwards Entrepreneurship category recognises scalable and market-ready projects, an area where Remarkably has already shown clear traction. Remarkably charges $3 per student per month and has signed customers, including schools and tuition centres in Singapore.
The team plans to use its cash prize to expand the platform's reach to Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Hong Kong. Remarkably currently supports English and Bahasa Indonesia and is working with Huawei towards using Huawei's ModelArts AI development platform and OCR technology.
"Tech4City's mission is to give young innovators the skills, partners, and confidence to catalyse this change. By supporting talent and projects that enhance healthcare, education, and urban life, we hope to build a 'We-first Singapore' — a smarter, more inclusive, and sustainable future for all," says Maxi Wang, CEO of Huawei International.
Speaking at the competition as a guest of honour, Speaker of the Parliament Seah Kian Peng, says: "To scale impact, partnerships between industry, academia, and government are key. Huawei has been an important partner in advancing AI, 5G, cloud and computing, and in nurturing local talent." He calls on industry partners to "keep mentoring and supporting these young innovators" and academic partners to "keep nurturing curiosity and courage."
IoT fridge tackles food distribution woes
In Tech4City's Budding Youths category, the team from ITE College Central was awarded the $4,000 top prize for Coolnected, a community fridge equipped with Internet of Things (IoT) sensors to ease food collection for residents in need.
The solution tackles a common issue at food distribution points. Residents in need often endure hour-long waits in Singapore's heat, only to find that supplies have already run out. With Coolnected, residents in need can tap their registered EZ-Link cards to unlock the IoT-enabled community fridge and collect donated food at their convenience.
Data from IoT sensors also flows into a cloud-based dashboard, allowing a single food distribution officer to remotely monitor inventory levels across multiple fridges and user access patterns. These insights help food distributors match donations to actual demand more accurately while identifying potential exploitation of the system.
Coolnected has been deployed in a community centre in Singapore and attracted interest from Thailand after winning competitions there. The team plans to hand the project over to the next cohort of ITE students to continue development, with future enhancements including Huawei's Elastic Cloud Server to host the dashboard and the Simple Message Notification service to alert officers when food supplies run low.
Sharpening go-to-market skills
The Tech4City Competition supports Singapore's national Digital for Life Movement by fostering digital literacy and innovation for all. Huawei contributes technical training through its ICT Academy and encourages participants to pursue certifications in cloud, 5G, AI and ICT. More than 3,000 local ICT talents have been trained in the past three years, with Tech4City teams receiving cloud credits to experiment with Huawei solutions.
Both winning teams credited the competition's mentorship programme for sharpening their pitches.
"Tech4City mentorship has helped us with our pitching. We spoke to experts from various fields who shared their opinions on how to craft our pitch and better present our solution," says Harry Wu, team leader of team Remarkably.
Eng Kai Yang, Coolnected team's team leader, agrees, adding that the competition "also gave them a good opportunity to explore more technologies, including Huawei's, that can be used to refine the solution in future."
Four other teams were recognised at the Tech4City Competition as well. This includes Republic Polytechnic's team that developed the hear2go mobile app, which announces bus and bus stop numbers to enable the visually challenged to take public transport independently. The app won the $3,000 Best Innovation in Mobility award, sponsored by SBS Transit.
"SBS Transit is pleased to support the Tech4City Competition as it gives young talents the space to push boundaries and reimagine how our city can move and live better. What stands out each year is the energy, creativity and heart our youths bring. Their ideas reflect a sincere desire to make daily life better for the community, and that spirit is something we value deeply. I appreciate the thought and effort each participant put into their work, and extend my warmest congratulations to the winners," says Jeffrey Sim, Group CEO of SBS Transit.
