 Happy to be here today with Russ Shields, who's the Chairman of YGOMI and active participant in ITU's work on intelligent transport systems. Welcome Russ. Thank you Toby, it's a pleasure to be here at ITU. Very good. I was wondering if you could start by giving us an overview of what exactly intelligent transport systems means. The simple definition is applying communications and computer technology to transport, which is honestly relatively recent. And we all grew up in our ages where there was nothing in transport that was computer and communications. Over the last 30 years we've slowly but surely been adding transport to the communications world and to the computer technology world. And can you explain why it's important? There's many things that you see in your cars. You see much more technology, particularly safety. And we've used technology to substantially reduce the number of vehicle accidents and deaths. We continue to be working towards that. We've done lots that you see like here the bus system now has priority so that when it comes to a signal it actually changes. And you can go on the internet and you can find when the next bus is. So there's many, many kinds of information and it's being used for traffic management, control, electronic toll. Most of you know that you now can drive through on tollway. And there's a number of things that are part of moving the transport world into the modern era of communications. The focus of the workshop that we had here yesterday together with UNECE was the application of ITS in developing countries. Can you explain why ITS would be important to developing countries in particular? It certainly varies from country to country and how they're able to build infrastructure and as they build infrastructure apply technology. So most developing countries now have a reasonable deployment of smartphones. Certainly most people have phones and they're moving to smartphones so that you can start providing information to people telling them about problems, telling them about things that they should do. They have much higher death rates than we do in U.S. or you have in Europe or others. So there's a very strong interest in figuring out how to reduce the death rate. And particularly there's this interest in a lot of countries on how to move to funding transportation from users, road pricing as we would call it, to be able to actually have, whether it's vehicles that are cars or trucks or what have you, pay for the use of the infrastructure to be able to raise the money to be able to build out their infrastructure. Yes, I suppose the financial considerations will always be the difficult ones. Are there many real world examples of ITS today? Simple things are control systems, smart intersections, ways that the authorities have used computers to balance signal systems and what have you. Cars, now you're starting to have things like stability systems. You're actually, some of the high-end cars now have radar systems that will automatically speed up and slow down. So there's a cross-section of those for both the government authorities and in the vehicles that have worked on improving the transport experience for people, both in cars and in buses and certainly a lot in logistics and trucks to be able to track where your shipment is. We've sent things by parcel or what have you and are able to go on the internet and see where our shipment is. These are many, many types of things where we've applied computer technology communications to things to be able to improve the working of transport and improve the experience of people in transport. It already sounds like a pretty impressive set of technologies, but what do you see for the future? The most important thing that we're working on towards the future is step by step to get to automated self-driving vehicles where we want to move from piece to piece to get better ways to control the vehicles. So there will be in fact vehicles on sale in the next couple of years where on at least a motorway when it's stop and go 30 kilometers an hour below it will actually drive by itself so you can read their newspaper while the car is going. Now that continued technology works on keeping cars in lanes, preventing things from cars hitting each other. We're working on communications to send things vehicle to vehicle so that as two cars come to an intersection we can talk to each other and make sure they don't hit each other. Many kinds of things on the safety side, at the same time on the authority side. There's a continued effort to reduce congestion, trying to improve the traffic flow, trying to find out ways we can do it. I think there's a serious use of the technology for emissions to try to identify vehicles, what are making the emissions, how to control the emissions, how to reduce it. So there's a number of the evolutions of technology that will help over the next 10 to 20 years. I certainly look forward to following the progress of the technology in general and the standardization work surrounding that. Thank you very much for coming to speak with us today. Thank you.