 Good afternoon, everyone, and a warm welcome to our audience on the livestream and webcast. You're joining the press conference on data-driven development, and this press conference is serving as a platform for the launch of the Pathways for Progress report, which has been prepared by the Forum's Global Agenda Council on data-driven development. I'm joined today by a very distinguished panel to talk about the subject, true to the Forum's multi-stakeholder approach. We have voices from various sectors. Let me quickly introduce them to you. To my immediate left is Alan Marcus, who is a senior director at the World Economic Forum and also the head of our information technology and telecommunications industry. Further down the road, we have Professor Alex Pendland. He's the Toshiba Professor of Media, Arts and Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT. Further down the line, we have Mikal Haakstrom, who's the executive vice president for Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Asia Pacific of SAS, and also a member of this Global Agenda Council on data-driven development. Further down the line is Peter Gabriel. You know him all as a musician, but he's also here as the founder of Real World today and feels also very strongly about the issue. And last but not least, we are joined today by Sam Gregory, who is the program director of WITNESS. And without further ado, I'm handing over to you Alan. Thank you. So welcome and thank you for joining us today for us to launch this incredible report, Data-Driven Development Pathways for Progress. This has been written by, in fact, the Global Agenda Council on data-driven development, which we have some members here as announced. Data is a life-bud of sustainable development and holds tremendous potential for transformative positive change, particularly for lower and middle-income countries. Yet despite the promise of a data revolution, progress is not a certainty. A lack of clarity on privacy and ethics, asymmetric power dynamics, a lack of understanding of the needs of individuals, and an array of entangled societal and commercial risks threatened to hinder progress. Our new report addresses these complexities and provides a blueprint for progress framed on three key priorities. One is addressing the data deficit, two strengthening the governance and ethics and use of data, and three empowering individuals and communities with greater tools and understanding for leverage and use. All three of these tracks link to pragmatic, open, and practical ways for progress, which the Council is actively supporting in a variety of ways. I'd like to invite our panelists now to share a few thoughts on those dimensions and then we can open up for a discussion. Thank you. So without further ado. Yeah, so this last fall I had the honor of helping the UN Secretary-General put together a report about the importance of data, which he calls the data revolution, in achieving the sustainable development goals. Essentially, you have to be able to know where the poor, the underserved, the displaced are in order to be able to help them. You have to know about the roots of ethnic violence in order to be able to cure them. Data is now an integral part of creating an honorable and equitable world. And while that report is wonderful and I urge you to read it, here at the forum we also bring in the voices of industry and academia. And we see three different things that are needed to go along with the basic declaration of this data revolution. One is that there's a data deficit. So it's not the case that everybody has access to data at this point. And it's not just a matter of more devices or more internet connections. It's also that there needs to be a public-private partnership because much of the data comes from banks or telcos or companies. And we need to build an ecology where we can share data so that we can all do better. Another issue is trust and governance. Everyone is concerned about privacy, about bad actors, authoritarian governments that might turn on their own people. And towards this, we've been talking about what I call the New Deal on Data, which empowers citizens with far more control and knowledge about data that is about them. Sort of moving us from a current condition, which you could call digital serfdom into a digital democracy. And the final issue is around empowering individuals. Data is not knowledge. To be able to really act on this, you need to have data literacy. You need to build capacity for people to understand it. And you need to have local interpretation of what this data means so that you can have local action. You can't all come from some far-off office done by experts. And so I think those are the key issues in this report. Thank you very much. So we're moving down the line. Mikal, share with us, what's the business perspective on that issue? Is it a threat? Is it something you welcome, this data revolution? Yeah, clearly. What we have been working on in the council is to strengthen the governance systems around it, and the data ethics piece, the safety, the security. And to that effect, catalyzed by the World Economic Forum, the council has been working on those topics to form a global coalition of leading experts in all the different faculties, ranging from privacy, data ethics, governance, civil society, humanitarian aid, and so on. And this multi-stakeholder community will continue to work together to drive technical and legal innovations to strengthen trust and accountability and the tools for using and accessing the data. And we're going to have a kickoff event in Den Haag, February 24. But let me give you a practical example perhaps that describes it. We do have doctors without borders. We don't necessarily yet have data scientists without borders. Data scientists that look after security, that looks after data quality, that looks after privacy. So if you think of a case like the Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines that we lived through, the NGOs needed the data from us, from the companies. And as a company, there are a lot of legal uncertainty around handing over the data to an NGO, but you do want to help. So clearly, when it comes to field-based access of data that they already have, it's easy to help. And that made a big difference. That saved a lot of lives because in the crisis, they could determine what equipment they needed to send, where it turned out that what was needed was most was diesel because the generators to the hospitals weren't running, but that wasn't necessarily what was in the shipments. And the diesel had been taken by the locals. They wanted to get off the island and have it to their boats. But if we then take it to the next step, when you want to predict to prevent or predict to prepare, you're going to need more data. And it was touched on earlier by the professor when he touched on the fact that we need to have location data. Location data is more personal. It's not anonymized. So there we might need to flip the script and have the more sensitive data in a safer location and perhaps take the question, take the model to the data. And there is, in fact, a blog on the website if I am allowed to promote it today based on the model app. So these are some of the topics we are discussing and getting together. And certainly the viewpoint from all the different legal, social, ethical constituents becomes very important in order to create an approach where we can actively share the data and use it for the improvement of society. Thank you very much. I think that's very important to have the insights from the business community on that. And by all means, let's promote your blog post. So please go to www.forum.org and read it. But let's hear from Peter Gabriel what his perspective on this data revolution is. Why is it an issue close to your heart, Peter? Share with us. Well, I think it's a bit like when computers were introduced or the internet, none of us really got the full potential of how that was going to impact our lives. And in many ways, we're just living data and we're creating, generating data all the time. I think it's going to be of huge importance who owns and controls this data. There will be data wars coming. And yet, what is this stuff that they're calling the new oil, besides being very powerful for business, it has enormous potential for people because what it allows is to make the world visible. And when you can see it and feel it and watch it, then you can start feeding it into sort of ecosystems built around problems and making sensible decisions and making actions, whether emergency short term or long term solutions actually count and mean something to people. I feel that the mobile phone too, particularly, is the instrument that most excites me. I think that's going to transform our world more than anything else we've ever invented. And it gives access to people, to education, to health care, and they can start using their data, controlling it. Sandy's been working on his personal data storage idea too. And that can also be the basis of allowing people with no money, but hopefully a telephone, which I think will be the case in a lot of parts of the world, a chance to create something of value and be part of a world economy. So I think it is of huge importance this data revolution may be as important as the internet revolution. So in our particular field, which Sam will now talk about of human rights, I think it's going to be vital and provide people that suffer many opportunities and a new set of weaponry through which to defend themselves and get justice. Thank you very much. So Sam, tell us about what Peter already mentioned. What role can data play in the defense of human rights? So I think there's two sides to the question. One is how it can support the defense of human rights and the other is how do we grapple with the human rights risks? Within the vast volume of data that is both purposefully generated and out there as data exhaust, we've experienced over half a million purposefully created videos from Syria that might show war crimes. There are hundreds of millions of photos on Facebook. The questions become, how do we find the needle in the haystack? How do we understand that haystack? And how do we understand the field so that we can warn communities more quickly if there is danger? We can mobilize communities worldwide with accurate information. We can hold accountable perpetrators by really demonstrating what's going wrong and eventually predict and prevent, obviously, the ultimate goal. At WITNESS, we focus on the power of individuals with camera phones in their pockets and how the data those phones create, which is that complex combination of photos and videos and internet and metadata, is used to create change. And for us, the first principle, and I think it's very reflected in the WEF work, is pushing the power to the individual to make the choice about the data that they share and its usage as much as possible. So an example of the work very directly in a human rights context for us is we push for companies to integrate a proof mode in their devices that enables people to choose to add data into it that makes it more useful as evidence, more findable, more valuable as a data point, but also to choose sometimes to take data out of purposefully created media because there are great risks to individuals. You can be identified from a single piece of media or also an aggregate set of data that you create, the unanticipated risks there. I think some of the elements, I think, very powerfully come through from a human right side when I read the report is the idea of using data for good but recognizing the vulnerabilities of individuals. Both in our societies where there is developed rule of law, but as you look at a data set, there are risks of discrimination, of new forms of redlining, of ways in which governments and institutions use aggregate data that discriminate against individuals and groups, but also the vulnerability of specific people who can be identified in places where there is recrimination against individuals. I also wanna pick up on Sandy's point that it's not about just access to the data and the data set, but not everyone is yet in the data set and just making sure that we're not contributing to inequalities that way. And finally, just to note again, this emphasis on really pushing control and agency and understanding to the individual as much as possible, recognizing the risks there and knowing that, of course, these data sets, if we want them to have real value, might need to have value over many years and over contexts that are not just the single incident and really grappling with that through a human rights lens seems tremendously important right now. Thank you very much. I see we have a question here and we have a microphone coming for the sake of our online audience. Could you state your name and organization, please? Thank you. Luis Miguel Gonzalez, El Economista de Mexico. Thank you. I will try to say in the most respectful way. You all come from developed countries. I think one of the problem, perhaps, is the interaction between the well-intended people in developed countries and the reality in the not-so-developed world. I mean, in some places there are problems with the data that belongs to the dictatorship in other countries that are just poverty. But if this kind of initiative has some kind of protagonistism from the developed countries, I think it's always a risk. I don't know if I was... I've been making my point clear. Yes, absolutely. And I think to this point, Professor Schwab mentioned in the recent days that the new global context, the theme of this meeting, one of the main themes there is the lack of trust. And I think the building of governments and the empowerment of individuals speaks to that. And Peter, you mentioned mobile phones. Sam, you mentioned the empowerment, making sure that there's no inequality in data. I think all these points speak to your question. But I think, Alex, if you would address that, please. I think there are two points I'd make. One is in the report to the UN Secretary General, which is what we do today results in millions of babies dying, millions of people dying from ethnic violence because of a lack of data. And so we are forced by moral concerns to try and do better than we do today. And we've been given this new source data, which is Promethean. Could be bad, could be good. Because we cannot allow those millions of people to die without trying to do something, we have to try and turn that force to good. I don't think that there's any moral choice in the matter. The other thing, though, that I would say is that I run an entrepreneurship program for people from the developed world. So we have 120 people every year who are people from all over the global South. And what we find is that they're very excited about data, about the way that you could begin to bring services to poor people that previously were invisible. Those services could be toilets, those services could be food, those services could be many things. One example is one group is making navigation aids for cars and trucks. Except in this navigation aid, you can see where there are barricades with terrorists and you can see where there are IEDs. And where they come from, that's the biggest issue. And as Peter and so forth were saying, you know, you don't want to get caught with that data, so it's very sensitive and privacy and control is a really critical thing. But we have the possibility to change these circumstances. Could I add to? I certainly get your point about dictator and who controls the data, but I think that's partly why it's so important. But to me, the argument is reminiscent of people talking about the impact of the mobile phone because it was, well, this is something in the wealthy connected world and it is so evident now that actually when it gets out there, it really gives people who don't have money and opportunity a new means of getting education, healthcare, access to communication, to economy, to economic knowledge, you know, if they're growing things of market prices and the phone is now an accepted essential part of life for all but two billion people. I think the same argument will apply to this. This is early days, you know, we're here in an empty room, this subject isn't sexy, but sure as hell in 10 years time, I think it's gonna be very different. Thank you very much. I think mindful of the time, we would close the panel here. Let me thank you very much on behalf of the World Economic Forum, all of you to join this session and thank you for watching. Thank you.