 Welcome to the World Summit on the Information Society 2016 in Geneva, Switzerland. And I'm delighted to be joined by Michael Best, who's the Director of the UN University Institute on Computing and Society in Macau. Now you're new to the UN family, but I understand you're not exactly a university. That's right, and thank you so much for the invitation to chat with you today. The UN University Institute on Computing and Society is only one year old. We're a new institute within the UNU Federation of Research Institutes, and we're not a university in the traditional sense. We don't enroll students and we don't grant degrees, but we do work with students and with other researchers around issues of importance to the UN system. So in the case of UNUCS and Macau, we're interested in the relationship of ICTs to the SDGs. So in that sense, a meeting like the WUSIS Forum is really central to the area that we focus on. Indeed, it's all about ICTs and how they can enable and accelerate the sustainable development goals in 2030. So can you tell me the sort of research projects that you're embarking on? Absolutely. We have three main research focus areas. The first is in gender technologies, and by that we're particularly interested in the role of ICTs for women empowerment and for ensuring that there is equality amongst the use and the production of ICT artifacts between women and men. We also have a research focus on peace technologies. That primarily is looking at the role of ICTs amongst the peacekeeping units of the United Nations. That's the balloon helmet forces that we all see too often, frankly, on the news in the evenings. And then the third area we're focused on is the role of data, particularly towards the SDG goals and targets. But in our case, we're interested in how data can empower and enable people at the grassroots. So we're examining ways in which data can be acquired, analyzed, purposed, and delivered to people at a household or individual level around goals of the sustainable development agenda. So you've got a very broad curriculum there at the Research Institute. If we just take women's empowerment, how can information communication technology empower women? Sure. I think there are two critical ways in which ICTs works towards women's empowerment. The first way is as a tool towards empowerment. ICTs are the key element to which we communicate today, and communication is a key element in which we build our societies and our economies. And so it's natural in that sense to think that the role of ICTs as a tool to women's empowerment is as central as is communication or connections and women's empowerment. We've been looking, in particular at UNUCS, at elements of design of ICTs as it relates to women's empowerment. So we know that you can design a first-person shooter game in a way that never gets a girl interested in picking up that particular game console and playing that game. I mean, that's just an empirical truth. But if we have women game designers, we know that we can increase women participation, in this case, in gaming. Similarly, if we work at things around economic systems and ICT like mobile banking, if we have women engineers working to design new banking systems, we could help, in particular in societies where the female head of household is the main keeper of money and distributor of money. That's true, for instance, in Myanmar where one of our projects exists. And so we're looking at the design of mobile banking systems in ways that would empower women to be financial decision makers. That's very interesting because as you say, it is often women who hold the purse strings. Just before you leave us, I wanted to pick up also about this idea about not just big data for international organizations but small data for households. Can you explain more about that? Well, the traditional way that we think about big data, in particular for thinking about monitoring attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals, so progress towards realizing Agenda 2030, the normal way we might think about that as a UN organization even, would be that you conduct a series of household surveys. You aggregate all of that data, you analyze it into a slick presentation or report, and that report goes and sits in a minister's office in a capital of some country or at a UN agency headquarters. Instead, what we're really interested in, and we call this small data, meaning small units of analysis, not small amounts of data, we're interested in ways in which that same data might be aggregated and analyzed, not for the minister in the capital or the UN agency in the capital, but back for the individual or the household that was the creator of the original data. An example might be around the Sustainable Development Goals for clean water access. A traditional approach to monitoring progress towards clean water would aggregate data across a number of, say, communities as to their water quality levels and then produce a national report about this water quality statistics. The small data approach instead would provide and hopefully empower individuals with information about their own community's water properties in ways that would be actionable for those individuals or households. For instance, my well water is not high quality, but the well just a half a kilometer away is high quality. How could I change my morning routine so that I can increase the quality of my household water? Michael Best, director of the UN University Institute on Computing and Society in Macau. Thank you very much for joining us this afternoon and please do join us on the ITU YouTube channel where we'll be hearing from experts on the impact that information and communication technology is having on people's lives all around the world.