Category: Blog

A decade ago, smart phones brought a whole new meaning to a popular adjective. But ‘smart’ has not stopped there – from smart fridges to smart cars and smart cities, we are living in an ever-smarter world. A world where applications, solutions, products, and increasingly whole industries are making innovative use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to improve the quality of our lives and the efficiency of our services.

The potential is enormous. In a smart city, for example, everything from transport to urban planning, electricity supply, local government services and the management of resources and infrastructure can be improved through the use of ICTs.

As more and more of the world’s population moves to cities, it is essential to make use of smart technologies to encourage sustainable urbanization, protect the environment and manage living spaces, traffic and utilities effectively.

Smart banking – digital financial services – has the potential to use ICTs and mobile technology to reshape financial transactions and processes, provide universal, secure services and bring large numbers of the 2 billion currently unbanked adults into the world economy. Smart connected cars will improve road safety, reduce congestion and emissions, and increase mobility options for the elderly and disabled; smart health solutions can transform healthcare through personalized medicine, and mobile or remote health delivery.

The growing trend to integrate manufacturing with smart technologies promises tailored products to meet individual customer requirements at low cost and in high quality, with huge impact for companies, economies and societies across the globe. This is Industry 4.0, or the 4th Industrial Revolution, demonstrating the enormous transformative potential of smart technologies in all aspects of life.

But reaching that potential involves a range of challenges in the realms of technology, policy, regulation and business.

The new technologies that will power our smart future require international standards in order to provide seamless, interoperable services on a global scale; fair and meaningful allocation of spectrum; and unqualified privacy and security. Standardization, as well as policy initiatives and new regulatory approaches, are essential to address the unique needs of the developing world – to avoid the digital divide deepening into a digital chasm.

ITU Telecom World 2017 will bring together public and private sector leaders from developing and developed markets around the world to exhibit, debate and network on the theme of smart digital transformation, its impact and opportunities – and on many of the challenges outlined above. The event takes place in the pioneering smart city of Busan, a global leader in enhanced technology ecosystems in one of the world’s most technologically-advanced nations, the Republic of Korea.

Busan is an exemplary model of IoT-based public services across a whole swathe of urban infrastructure, from traffic control to environment and safety management, smart transportation to reduction of energy consumption, tourism infrastructure and disaster management. Busan’s smart city experience is a citizen-driven project to improve quality of life for all through IoT technology. As such, there could be nowhere better to host these important discussions on our smart future – and the global opportunities it offers.

Find out more about ITU Telecom World 2017 here.

Industry, innovation and infrastructure should not be imported into the world’s emerging economies. Instead, investments should be made into growing sectors, seeding applied research and allowing the local economy to create and grow their own base.

If we’re going to solve local problems, then we should also look locally for the solutions, and support them.

The United Nations’ ninth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 9) — to improve industry, innovation, and infrastructure — presents us with one of the most interesting of all the SDG goals, as it is truly a foundational one that undergirds almost all of the other SDGs.

The underlying technologies that support most other verticals are power and connectivity, so if you hope to achieve the SDGs at scale, these two areas require focus.

The numbers are staggering globally. Some 3.9 billion people are still not connected to the Internet, most in emerging markets. We’ve seen from ITU reports alone that while we see 84% of households connected in Europe, we only have 15.4% in the African region. Almost one quarter of the world’s unconnected population sits in Africa. It’s a hard problem to solve, because it’s not just a technology problem, it’s also a business model problem.

McKinsey released a fascinating report on “digital globalization” where they show that increasing flows of data and information now generate more economic value than the global trade in goods.

Stop and think about that for a moment.

“Homegrown technology companies like BRCK, based in Nairobi, provide some of the best solutions to local problems.” — Erik Hersman, CEO of BRCK

They’re saying that an industry that was practically inexistent 15 years ago can now bring in more value to a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) than the centuries-old trade in goods. But while Africa is moving forward — the Internet is more available, and devices for accessing it are getting less expensive — we’re still far behind. We’re simply not moving fast enough or staying close enough to the rest of the world. And that has profound consequences.

Still, increased access to the Internet is bringing real economic change in Africa. And there is only one investment needed: digital infrastructure. This is the undersea cables, the terrestrial cables, the Internet exchange points, data centers and content distribution points.

Just as regular commerce isn’t possible without physical infrastructure like roads, neither is e-commerce possible without digital infrastructure which gives us accessible Internet.

With a faster, cheaper and more reliable Internet, the entrepreneurs amongst us find our buyers and customers, serve them well, grow our business, and create jobs. And that’s exactly what’s happening in Kenya’s growing digital economy — where homegrown technology companies like BRCK, based in Nairobi, provide some of the best solutions to local problems.

My world at BRCK revolves mostly around connectivity. Our products are used by students in completely off-grid schools, help to track vehicles at airports, and more importantly are getting ordinary Africans connected to the Internet on free public WiFi.

For the last four years, the BRCK team has continued to create some of the most innovative products in Africa, marrying up hardware and software. We do this so well because we live, work and are from Kenya — we know the challenges and opportunities inherent in our country, and can translate the ideas these inspire into products that aren’t just used in Kenya — or even Africa. BRCK products are sold as far away as Mexico and the Solomon Islands, as well as 50+ other countries around the world.

The newest device we make is called the SupaBRCK — a small, self-powered router that provides local Internet service, saves content locally, and connects to the Internet using whatever is available, either cable, cell tower or satellite. We set up these devices as a free, local WiFi network to which anyone nearby can connect. It isn’t just Internet that people are getting, but locally stored content as well. With the TV shows, music and books stored locally, this means anyone accessing that content via their device gets it quickly and reliably and it costs us nothing to deliver, dramatically improving the economics.

We use this technology in schools, too, in a product called the Kio Kit, which was designed to instantly turn a basic schoolroom into a digital classroom — even in remote, disconnected environments. The Kio Kit consists of 40 rugged tablets, an integrated SupaBRCK server, and digital educational content. By including all of the critical components necessary to effectively introduce technology into the classroom, the Kio Kit solves the challenges of the many failed efforts at designing computers for African schools.

With such an Internet infrastructure, paired with a proper business model, we have a chance to change one of the very basic infrastructure issues on our continent, paving the way for so many other companies to build products and services that make the next 800 million Africans lives better.

BRCK won the ITU Telecom World Global SME Award at ITU Telecom World 2016 in Bangkok, Thailand​. Find out more on their Awards experience here.

Originally published on ITU News

How can accelerators and incubators work to foster innovation and entrepreneurship? This was the question debated by a lively and highly-experienced panel drawn from three continents under the inquiring moderation of Dan Simmons of BBC World News Click Online.

David Maasz, CEO, Entrepreneurship Foundation, summarised the wisdom of over twenty years building internet startups, motivating others to execute and mentoring entrepreneurs inspired to make the world a better place: it’s all about personal relationships. And those relationships are built on cooperation, on trust, shared values and mindset.

Silicon Valley expert Ron Sege, President and CEO of Echelon Corporation, agreed: “Horizontal collaboration is one of the stand-out differences that contributed to the success of Silicon Valley, bringing individuals from different walks of life together.”

Listening to start-ups to know their various concepts and needs in connecting to local ecosystems, Isidro Laso Ballesteros, Head of Startup Europe Sector, European Commission, is amazed at how unconnected to each other they remain: “We need to make sure they are connected to each other and at the nexus of investors, potential customers, other startups and SMEs.”

Approaching the same issue from another angle, Stian Westllake, Executive Director of Policy and Research at Nesta, finds a good place to start is in using big data to understand a country’s innovation ecosystem, to study innovation policy in different governments and to research what works and what doesn’t.

It seems to be working in Rwanda, as Alline Kabbatende, Chief Operating Officer, RwandaOnline Platform, explained: “Rwanda has risen from a very sad past to become one of the leading competitive countries in Africa, recognizing innovation in all spheres of government,” from a single e government portal for businesses to e government services in partnership with the public sector and working with upcoming tech companies to develop services, train new graduates and boost practical ICT skills. It’s an holistic approach focused on education and government services to establish ICT-based innovation for the public good.

Asked why what works so patently well in Silicon Valley cannot be simply transplanted elsewhere n the world, Ron Sege pointed out that there is some kind of magic alchemy, a mix of different ingredients – but the most important of all is to foster a culture and environment of risk taking. “It is an hour to have failed and almost a stigma not to have,” he said. “The only failure is not thinking big enough.”

Moderator

• Dan Simmons, Presenter and Senior Producer, Click, BBC World News, United Kingdom

Panellists

• Mr Isidro Laso Ballesteros, Head of Startup Europe Sector, European Commission, Belgium
• Ms Alline Kabbatende, Chief Operating Officer, RwandaOnline Platform, Rwanda
• Mr David Maasz, CEO, Entrepreneurship Foundation, Hungary
• Ms Jaqueline Pateguana, Advisor to the Minister for Mozambique MEGCIP, Ministry of Transport and Communications, Mozambique
• Mr Ron Sege, President and CEO, Echelon Corporation, USA
• Mr Stian Westlake, Executive Director of Policy and Research, Nesta, United Kingdom

I am so delighted to have been asked by the ITU and Child Helpline International to moderate their important session on “Partnering to protect children and youth” at the ITU’s Telecom World gathering in Bangkok on 15th November.  The abuse of children online is without question one of the darkest aspects of the use of ICTs, and it is great to see the work that so many child helplines are doing globally to counter and respond to this.

The main objective of the session is to highlight the work done by a range of ICT stakeholders to initiate and support child helplines in various parts of the world.  The session will begin with introductory remarks from Houlin Zhao (the Secretary General of the ITU) and Professor Jaap Doek (Chair of the Board of Child Helpline international).  This will be followed by a short video entitled No child should be left behind, and then Jenny Jones (Director Public Policy, GMSA) will launch new child online protection guidelines for child helplines.  Following this, Doreen Bogdan-Martin (Chief of Strategic Planning and Membership,  ITU) will provide a short overview of the joint campaign being run by the ITU and Child Helpline International to protect children and youth.  She will also outline the process whereby case studies submitted to an online consultation organised by the ITU were selected by a specialist Jury.

I will then moderate what I hope will be a lively and useful panel discussion that brings together the following people and initiatives that were selected through the above process:

• Anthony Fitzgerald, Kids Helpline Manager, representing Optus from Australia;
• Ola-jo Tandre, Director and Head of Social Responsibility, Telenor Group;
• Mofya Chisala, Strategic Analyst, Zambia Information and Communication Technology Authority; and
• Enkhbat Tserendoo from the Communications Regulatory Commission of Mongolia, Mobicom

As moderator, I hope to be drawing out general conclusions about what works, as well as the pitfalls to avoid, from the experiences of these examples of good practice from many different parts of the world.  I very much hope that this will help those in other countries who are thinking about setting up child helplines, and that these experiences will also help those already running such helplines to improve the services that they offer children and young people.

Working together in partnership, we must do much more to counter the abuse of children online, and child helplines are an important element of the overall package of initiatives that must be implemented to achieve this.

Terrestrial Wi-Fi and cellular networks support just a portion of the grid that will be required to allow fully autonomous vehicles to navigate city streets and highways. Satellites will play an equally important role in delivering secure software updates and other critical information, such as mapping data, needed for the connected car.

Connected and autonomous vehicles are going to forever change the way we move people and products.  The connected environment will also change the way auto manufacturers address vehicle operational improvements, which are increasingly software-driven.  The savings available from cutting even a single recall visit over the lifespan of a vehicle provide a compelling argument for enabling connectivity to vehicles.

Cars, trucks and buses that don’t need drivers offer the promise of saving time and money, getting commuters and goods to their destinations faster and more easily, and aiding mobility for disabled and older people. Such intelligent transport systems and self-driving vehicles are fast moving towards widespread commercialization, with higher levels of automation on the road expected by 2020. Many auto manufacturers and high-technology companies are engaged in experimental testing of autonomous vehicles. One Colorado, U.S.- based company just announced that it has used self-driving technology to move a truckload of cargo 125 miles from one city to another. And citizens of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, regularly see driver-less cars on their streets, not far from a testing headquarters for another major driverless car innovator.

Both passenger safety and network security are paramount for connected and autonomous automobiles. Government regulators will demand failsafe and ubiquitous communication that is more than tamper-resistant because human lives depend on the reliability and security of networks communicating with autonomous vehicles. Satellites are indispensable to providing secure, resilient and ubiquitous wireless connectivity to complement terrestrial communication networks, with notable differences in terms of cyber considerations.

Automotive digital technology historically has been focused on optimizing the internal functions of automotive systems and, more recently, on the use of sensor technologies that monitor and identify objects near vehicles. Attention has now shifted towards developing communication technologies that integrate cars with smart devices via the Internet.

Satellite communications will play an important role in the connectivity and autonomy of intelligent cars with software updates and machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. A key challenge is to create a totally reliable and ubiquitous communication system that is both highly secure and economically viable. At Intelsat, we are closely involved in these initiatives to ensure that intelligent vehicles make the best use of what satellite technology has to offer.

An autonomous vehicle requires two different types of external signal connections. Functions of the car such as steering or braking that need information about other vehicles along a route must rely on terrestrial networks with virtually no signal latency due to the time-sensitive nature of these interactions. Vehicles must react instantly to the proximity of other moving vehicles or stationary objects.

Other vehicle functions that need less time-sensitive information can rely on satellites as a medium of communications due to the inherent attributes of satellite technology. For example, satellites can multicast updates to cars concerning road conditions ahead, local imaging of city streets and mapping of selected routes. Such information is necessary to enable the intelligent cars to “make decisions” autonomously as they move from place to place. These modern and intelligent cars need to have a massive repository of know-how built in them to ensure that they can be autonomous, and this know-how must be continually updated. Satellites are the most reliable, efficient and least expensive means of downloading these massive amounts of data into every car and truck on the highway.

In addition, auto manufacturers can use the broadcast capabilities of satellites to update connected car operating software, thereby avoiding costly recalls and updating the software one car at a time at dealerships. Manufacturers will play an important role in the adoption of connected car technology because they will be building flat-panel satellite antennas into the car body when it is on the assembly line.

The key advantages of using satellites to support the connected car include:

• Global reach — With a single geostationary satellite it is possible to provide communications downlinks over wide areas, such as entire countries or continents, including in rural areas with no terrestrial connections.
• Instant service rollout — Combined with complementary ground networks, satellites ensure that vehicles are connected everywhere. Such coverage is fundamental to vehicle safety because every autonomous vehicle on the highway will be updated at the same time.
• Globally harmonized spectrum — By and large, satellite spectrum allocations are globally harmonized. This greatly simplifies the design and implementation of hardware used in cars. More importantly, it allows the cars to be seamlessly and globally interoperable, reducing costs and complexity for the manufacturer.

Using satellites for connected and autonomous vehicles supports a number of the United Nations’ 2030 Global Goals that include cutting in half the number of global deaths and injuries from road traffic accidents by 2020 and providing access by 2030 to safe, affordable, accessible and sustainable transport systems for all.

Satellites will play a vital role as the world’s mobility patterns change from driver-operated to autonomous vehicles. Intelsat will continue to collaborate with its partners to develop the necessary technologies and applications for future intelligent transport systems – and we’re looking forward to debating this in full in the Forum session The connected car: freeway to the future or trouble on the road? at ITU Telecom World 2016 in the coming days.

Figure 1: Autonomous cars send and receive positioning data using reliable satellite communications

As the Director of The Open Group Trusted Technology Forum I am thrilled to be participating at ITU Telecom World 2016 in Bangkok, Thailand.  In particular, I will be on a panel of subject matter experts to discuss the challenge of securing business enterprises and critical infrastructures and the potential steps that can be taken now to address these challenges – steps that can start us down the path of, as the ITU Telecom conference theme notes, “Better Sooner”.

This session: “No Trade Without Trust” to be held on Wednesday, November 16 from 16:45 PM – 18:00 PM will address ICT trust, innovation and trade.

In this blog, I provide some insight into these global challenges – from my perspective. There will be additional perspectives from the panelists and the attendees that will foster further discussion in this relevant session!

Information and communication technologies (ICT) and their supply chains depend upon complex and interrelated networks of suppliers across a wide range of global partners. Suppliers deliver hardware and software components to Original Design Manufacturers (ODMs) or Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) who build products from the components, and in turn deliver products to customers directly or through a value-add reseller (who may add even more components) or to system integrators who integrate them with products from multiple providers at a customer site. This complexity leaves ample opportunity for malicious components with vulnerabilities that can potentially be exploited.

As a result, organizations now need assurances that they are buying from trusted technology providers who follow best practices every step of the way. This means that they not only follow secure development and engineering practices in-house while developing their own software and hardware pieces, but also that they are following best practices to secure their supply chains by requiring third parties who supply their components to also follow best practices for security. Modern cyber criminals continuously and exhaustively seek to identify any sort of vulnerability that can be exploited for malicious gain and the supply chain is no different.

One perspective I will bring to the discussion is the importance of assuring product integrity and the security of ICT global supply chains as a first line of defense to reduce the possibility that unauthorized functionality can be introduced into products and to mitigate vulnerabilities that can lead to maliciously tainted and counterfeit products. This first line of defense must not be ignored when considering how to prevent damage to critical infrastructure and the horrific consequences that can ensue.

The second perspective I will underscore is that many buyers do not know what to ask of, or require from, their providers to ensure they are building and delivering secure ICT.  They need guidance on what that dialogue looks like, what questions buyers need to ask of their suppliers and what recommendations or demands they need to make in their acquisitions.

Finally, I will bring the perspective that building secure ICT products and securing global supply chains is both a technical and a global geo-political issue. And that addressing the technical perspective in a vendor-neutral and country-neutral manner can have a positive effect on diminishing the geo-political issues.

The technical perspective is driven by the simple fact that we are living in a global economy; most everything has a global supply chain – virtually nothing is built from just one company or in just one country.  In order for products to have integrity and their supply chains to be secure, all constituents in the development of technology and the supply chain must follow best practices for security – both in-house and in their supply chains.

The related, but separate, geo-political perspective, driven by a desire to protect against malicious attackers and a lack of trust of/from nation-states, is pushing many countries to consider approaches that are disconcerting, to put it mildly. Unfortunately, because every country is extremely concerned (as they should be) about securing their critical infrastructures and their underlying supply chains, we are beginning to see attempts to address those concerns through local solutions (i.e., country-specific and disparate requirements that increase the cost burden on suppliers and can set up barriers to trade in the name of security).

In order to prevent that negative effect on trust and trade, it is essential that we advocate for common international approaches, which all countries can adopt, with the same risk-informed criteria for all providers, regardless of locale – thus raising all boats based on the tide of consistent international guidelines and global standards.

This is not to say that the risk for every environment or application for ICT is the same — the requirements for acquisition must also be based on risk analysis – but the more we can utilize international guidelines and standards to create a base level of solid security, the safer we all will be.

Of particular relevance are a few tools that are available now to help us achieve “Better, Sooner”, such as The EastWest Institute Buyers Guide Purchasing Secure ICT Products and Services: A Buyers Guide; The Open Trusted Technology Provider Standard – Mitigating Maliciously Tainted and Counterfeit Products (O-TTPS), approved by ISO as ISO/IEC 20243:2015; or the O-TTPS Certification/Accreditation Program, which is open to all ICT providers including ODMs, OEMs, component suppliers, and value-add resellers..

Again, these are only some of my perspectives – l can’t wait to hear other relevant perspectives from the panelists and the attendees at the “No trade without trust” session on Wednesday, November 16, 2016, 16:45 PM – 18:00 PM.

According to the new ITU Broadband Commission report, “State of Broadband 2016,” billions of people are still not connected to the internet and a half a billion homes that are connected do not have adequate broadband.  Many of these people live in developing countries in high cost areas that are currently unprofitable to serve.

To solve this problem, policymakers should consider imposing an upfront universal service obligation, or USO, in their countries’ upcoming 700 MHz auctions. Bidders will reflect the USO’s added costs of deployment in their proposed bids.  In this way, governments will efficiently fund broadband deployment costs to high cost areas and private companies will determine how best to meet the deployment obligation the regulator defines.

But even if affordable broadband is available, people need the skills to use digital tools to navigate the web.  Digital literacy programs and the use of ICT and broadband in schools can help close the adoption gap.

The ITU Broadband Commission Demand Creation Report provides several examples of public private partnerships that have made a difference. For example, a program implemented by the government of Senegal and the World Bank enables many university students to obtain computers and Costa Rica’s “connected homes program” benefits vulnerable socioeconomic groups via subsidies for computers and internet access.

Also helpful is the “Smart Africa” initiative, a regional program that brought together several heads of African countries, to improve adoption of ICT and broadband across Africa.

However, despite these efforts, more can be done. The value is clear: deploying more broadband and getting millions more people online will generate myriad social and economic benefits.

I look forward to discussing how we can best make further progress on broadband deployment globally – both on supply and demand sides – in the “Reaching another billion: Understanding what works to stimulate ICT adoption” session in the Forum at ITU Telecom World 2016 in the coming days.

Building an Inclusive ICT Innovation Ecosystem: A Success Story from Belarus Hi-Tech Park

Established 10 years ago as a start-up initiative, Belarus Hi-Tech Park (HTP) has provided software and IT services production growth at 30-40% annually and is expected to reach $1b this year. 10 years ago, we could not have imagined such results since the whole country exported software worth about $14m.

HTP has turned out to be one of the leading innovative IT clusters in Europe, with 164 resident companies and over 25,000 software engineers employed there. More than 3,000 new jobs are created in HTP companies annually.

Belarus has become a prominent player on the international IT market, with the professionalism and expertise of Belarusian software engineers being recognized globally. Thus, Gartner names Belarus among the Top 10 most attractive locations for service delivery centers in EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa).

HTP companies provide IT services on the B2B market to customers from 61 countries. EPAM, IBA Group, Itransition, Intetics, Exadel, ScienceSoft, System Technologies, and many other HTP residents are well-known internationally. Five out of ten of the world’s largest companies (according to Forbes Lists) are among HTP customers. Over 900 million people in more than 190 countries use applications developed in HTP.

Due to the unique innovation ecosystem created in HTP, a number of IT projects have already gained worldwide success: World of Tanks, Viber, Apalon, maps.me, MSQRD.

We are witnessing the emergence of a new economy – the information economy, with the individual at its core. So our task is to develop an ecosystem encouraging smart, talented people to work on their ideas in Belarus, and think globally when implementing them.

The major pillar of the HTP innovation ecosystem is a comprehensive cooperation between the IT industry and the country’s education system based on three models.

The Stanford model appeared to be the most favorable to bridge the gap between academic and real life and became the earliest we adopted. HTP companies have opened about 80 joint research labs in Belarusian universities as a channel for practical knowledge transfer. Initially, these labs were focused exclusively on software engineering; now they also teach business analytics, computer science, etc.

Over 30 university research departments of computer science and related subjects operate within HTP companies to bring together educational process and production, improve the quality of training, and enable students to gain their first professional experience.

Another example we followed is the John Bryce model. To solve a challenge Israel faced when about a million former Soviet Union immigrants, mostly engineers, failed to find jobs, they invited Motorola, HP and some other global high-tech corporations to open R&D centers, and created a special educational center to re-train adults in the hi-tech field. That gave an unprecedented boost to the Israeli IT industry.

In 2010, the Educational Center of the Hi-Tech Park was established with the participation of HTP residents to provide re-education for adults with a technical background. Over 5,000 people were retrained there. Today, the HTP Educational Center also works with students and children. For its efforts in promoting and fostering information society development, HTP Educational Center was highly appreciated by the WSIS (World Summit on the Information Society) expert group and honoured as a Champion of WSIS Prize 2016 during the WSIS Forum in Geneva.

One more model was prompted by our own experience. As HTP companies gained expertise in different areas, sometimes highly specialized, they started to establish their own competence centers. These centers allow companies’ employees to access best international and Belarusian practices and improve their skills in solving unusual and complex tasks. The competence centers also provide free courses to re-train adults who successfully pass special entrance tests (in mathematical logic, English, etc.).

Today, we are witnessing a boom in the start-up movement worldwide: in the USA, China, India, Brazil, and in European countries. Young people in Belarus are also eager to develop their own projects as they are witnessing an increasing number of global success stories in Belarus.

The HTP business incubator serves to encourage entrepreneurship and sustain the spirit of innovation. This is a place where innovators can meet engineers, and ideas for new business ventures can be born. Start-up companies developing their own products can get assistance and mentorship there.

Knowledge is important but motivation and inspiration mean even more. So we invite developers and founders of successful Belarusian projects to share their experience with startups and drive them.

Since our local market is small, we do not support projects intended for Belarus only. Instead, we encourage entrepreneurs to consider international prospects when working on their projects, and attract investments from abroad. If you can get funding in Singapore, Tokyo, Silicon Valley, or London, you are on the right road and develop a truly global product.

I look forward to sharing our experiences and learning from other participants in the B2G Dialogue “Top-down vs Bottom-up Innovation: Fostering Future Tech Entrepreneurship” at ITU Telecom World 2016 in the coming days.

Artificial intelligence announcements are happening daily and a catalyst for hyper time compression of innovation, driving extreme convergence of multiple domains, producing exponential acceleration automation and universal connectivity.

To illustrate there are these proof points:

• There is a prediction that the next AI breakthrough through a Master AI Algorithm would produce a company worth 10 Microsofts or more than 4 trillion dollars in market capitalization.
• From mobile and cloud first, we now have AI first as the current enterprise strategy.
• China has a startup investment fund of $337B, an amount greater than the GDP of over 80% of countries with a key focus on robotics and AI.
• A Hong Kong VC fund, Deep Knowledge Ventures, assigning an AI to its board for decision making.
• Baidu, China’s dominant search company, announcing an AI-based StockMaster App that analyses news, markets predicting sectors, stocks or markets changes.
• Telefonica and BigML using AI to select start-ups for funding.
• Accelerating this year, we see growing use of AI-based robo advisors in wealth management and the proliferation of intelligence agents and chat bots. Robo-advisors removing the need for brokers, generating higher returns with little cost/lower fees, reducing minimums, and growing alignment/anticipation with consumer needs/wants/behaviors.
• There is AI’s increasing implementation in consumer financial and healthcare apps pre-emptively guiding our daily financial and health lifestyle choices.
• McKinsey indicating that 58 per cent of US jobs can be automated with AI-based natural language processing working at average human levels.
• The financial services roundtable or FSR, a trade organization consisting of the 100 top CEOs in financial services, who manage more assets at 91.7 trillion USD than the annual global economy, is holding their Fintech Ideas Festival in January 2017 where AI is a major theme and its implications to financial inclusion and the future workforce.

How about predicting major global changes which impact the Sustainable Development Goals?

There is NELL, the Never-Ending Language Learner which is consuming the web with more than 50 million items learned.

Ultimately, this becomes an uber prediction tool much like Bing Predicts from Microsoft and Google prediction technology and with machine learning tools easily usable for supporting the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

When I keynoted on Megatrends in Korea, another speaker hosted by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning talked about a hybrid delphi system Korea is using to predict and then act upon future trends with over 80 per cent accuracy. It’s a combination of human/machine collaboration and a catalyst where they are trying to change to an algorithm based economy from component manufacturing and with over 4.5 per cent of their GDP going to R&D, the highest in the world.

What of the future?

The impact of AI is so profound and so widespread that Bill Gates in June provided a recommended must-read of The Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos. Pedro’s book describes the five tribes of machine learning as:

• Symbolists–Fill in gaps in existing knowledge
• Connectionists–Emulate the brain; this is Deep Learning
• Evolutionists–Simulate evolution
• Bayesians–Systematically reduce uncertainty
• Analogizers–Notice similarities between old and new

This year, I keynoted at ICSE, the world’s largest software engineering conference funded by the National Science Foundation, the research arms of the major technology companies and the four top science organizations in software engineering. Earlier from Pedro, I received his five top AI megatrends which I outlined at ICSE. I am reproducing them here due to their impact on SDGs and due to the pronounced impact on the international audience of top researchers:

1.The transition from computers that are programmed by us to computers that learn on their own. This is enabled by big data, and in turn enables the personalization of everything, from medicine to shopping, and the increasing automation of every function in an organization.

2.The automation of scientific discovery. Increasingly, each step of the scientific method, from gathering data to formulating hypotheses, is carried out by computers. This enables, for example, new drugs to be discovered at a much faster rate than before.

3.The replacement of white-collar workers by machines, not just blue-collar ones. Routine intellectual work can increasingly be done by AI; what’s hard to replace is physical dexterity, common sense, and integrative intelligence.

4.The transition from deterministic to probabilistic computing. From hardware to software, rigidly deterministic computations are giving way to probabilistic ones, enabling faster, cheaper, lower-power, larger-scale, more ubiquitous, more flexible, data-driven information systems.

5.The rise of evidence-based X, where X includes medicine, policy-making, development aid, and ultimately all important societal decisions. Instead of guesswork and mixed results, we have controlled trials that quickly weed out what doesn’t work from what does.

The future will see large parts of our lives influenced by AI of Everything (AoE)–the global AI mesh spawning a Digital Quake driving the Knowledge Synthesis of Everything (KSE), an inflection point for humankind and the SDGs.

ITU has responded with plans to hold a series of talks on AI that I will have the privilege of moderating at ITU Telecom World 2016 and the ITU Kaleidoscope academic conference in Bangkok, Thailand, this November.

ITU has also created a new LinkedIn group for debate on cutting-edge AI technologies and related ICT applications and services, with the aim of promoting discussion on the future course of AI innovation and its implications for technical standardization and governance. I encourage you to join the discussion to share your views on how you would like to see the international community approaching the biggest questions surrounding the future of AI and, by extension, the future of humanity.