 Thank you very much Dr. Lee and good morning ladies and gentlemen. It's a great pleasure to be here. I am Soumya Swaminathan and I'm the Chief Scientist of the WHO and I should perhaps give you a little bit of introduction on the WHO's new transformation which the DG just carried out a few months ago and within that one of the things that happened was a creation of a science division and I am and was appointed as a as the first Chief Scientist of WHO which is a little bit surprising considering the fact that WHO is a science-based evidence-based normative organization. We've been around for 70 years but it's good that we finally have the office of the Chief Scientist. This division has been set up to harness the power of science and technology and innovation and harness it in a way that will benefit the health of the world's population in a more deliberate and systematic way than we have been doing in the past. We must also move faster and with more foresight because obviously technology is changing so rapidly so we're setting up a foresight function which is going to look at emerging technologies and what the implications of those technologies could be for public health so really what are the benefits that we could harness from that but also on the other side what the potential risks could be if any and how those risks could be anticipated or managed and also for the public really to be educated and engaged in a discussion on these new technologies. The second major function of this division will be to ensure the technical excellence, the relevance and the efficiency of our core technical function so that's all the norms and standards that we produce and we're looking at really standardizing across the house and using the latest methods in development of those norms and standards and guidelines. Now within the science division there is a department of digital health and you'll hear from Bernardo a little bit more about this later but it was created because we realize that everything is going to be digital very soon and therefore that in fact the health area is probably one that's been left behind a little bit compared to other things like transport perhaps infrastructure, financial services where digital has really made a lot of inroads. We still need to see that happening on a large scale in health so there are many opportunities in front of us and also many policy decisions that will need to be made in order to maximize the use of these digital tools and technologies to advancing health because very often you do see and when we discuss with member states they tell us that they are confused they don't know what technologies to invest in they often invest in something just to find that the different systems are not interoperable they're not talking to each other and so they end up with fragmented digital systems within their own infrastructure where they still don't then have a holistic database so one of the things that WHO is being tasked to do by our member states is to advise them on what kind of investments they should make in digital health and where based on a systematic study and collection of evidence and there is now a lot of international groups global groups including something called global digital health partnership of about 26 countries that's been in operation for about two years and they've set up working groups to look at things like interoperability cyber security the clinical evidence base for the use of some of these technologies so there is a lot of interest and they look to WHO really to to set some of the the standard so we're now in the process of developing a digital health strategy that will go to member states next year at the World Health Assembly so exactly a year from now the strategy is being up on our website for public comments and I'm sure that some of you have seen it or may have even commented we got a large number of comments on the process of revising it now we do want to make full use of innovations innovations and technologies but also innovations and other health products devices drugs vaccines and social interventions and so we've set up as an innovation hub which is really going to be like the front door for innovations that people can can talk to WHO and partner with us our function again is to is to look at the evidence base around these innovations and make recommendations based on whether there's enough evidence of benefit compared to harms that's how we do our guidelines and if there isn't enough evidence then we would say that and encourage people to actually do more research and more data gathering and then we want to see those innovations that are really have a lot of potential to see them scaled up quite rapidly we see many many examples now of potentially wonderful solutions being tried and tested in small settings something that's often called pilotitis there are lots of pilots that are done but very difficult to get scale up happening and so that's where we need also are implementing partners and what happens with health products is once WHO says that these are effective they we put them on the list of essential medicines or devices or diagnostics then the large funding agencies globally the multilaterals as well as countries themselves then start purchasing those products because they know there's a quality assurance stamp so we're thinking about how do we do this in the field of artificial intelligence and as Dr. Lee has just said we have a focus group the AI for health focus group that's now and Thomas is chairing that focus group about eight or nine months old now just looking at the landscape of what's out there and what what should be working on obviously there's a lot of potential to harness AI for health there's no doubt about that all of you are experts in this field the question is I think what problem are you trying to solve we have to we have to first articulate the problem and then bring the technology to solve the problem so is it a problem of not having enough doctors or healthcare workers in remote rural settings say in Africa or in Asia I'll be trying to use technology to in some ways make up or replace the lack of adequate human resources let's say for diagnosis or for providing advice on treatment protocols so is that the use case scenario is it to automate the use of machine learning algorithms for reading of images CT scans or x-rays for example so that you can free up radiologists who are very rare in many countries they're not enough so that they could then focus on the more difficult questions or are there other case uses in predicting disease outbreaks and epidemics for example by by analyzing large data or analyzing data from multiple sectors including weather and and air and land and water data for example vector densities to predict outbreaks of vector-borne diseases so that there are a number of things you could you could think about and then of course there's the huge growing market of direct-to-consumer products the hundreds of apps that are now available that people can download and use to do all kinds of things and there's a risk in that as well because if something has not been evaluated and people start using it for self-diagnosis and self- treatment it might end up actually doing more harm than than good and so there needs to be some kind of regulation some kind of framework a governance framework and that's something that we're thinking that the WHO needs to take a lead on where of course we will work with all the partners regulatory agencies like the FDA and the European agencies but also our other UN partners as we as we go forward but this would be something of high priority to us the other aspects that we I think seeing with these technologies is is on the ethical side because very often we're talking about the use of data and when you talk about the use of human data then of course the question is who owns that data and there's no doubt that if it's data that's coming from you then then as an individual then you have full rights on that data but you might want to share that data for the greater public good and so I think a few countries have been very progressive in that they've had these discussions with their citizens and have been able to come to very good understanding on people having the rights to their own data and they can protect that if they like you know they want to keep something confidential or private but to a large extent believing that health data as a public good we also willing to share it for the greater good with governments in and there's a certain amount of trust obviously that that's involved here if they share it with governments if they share it with WHO they expect that they will be safeguards and that it will not you know be be put to commercial use without their consent or be used to discriminate in any way but would be used to feed into into things which would improve you know health of the population at large but this involves a wider discussion and so we do want to also engage in discussions with the public with philosophers and ethicists and social scientists about the implications of some of these new technologies and AI is definitely one of those that we're doing we're doing it for for other areas like gene editing for example where you know there's always very polarized debate on where the human gene embryonic gene editing should be allowed at all or not and there are very strong views on this so we now have a group of international globally recognized experts not just scientists but ethicists as well who are debating this issue and coming up with some global governance principles so so as I mentioned you know there could be many many many many applications and we want to do whatever's good for the greater good we have now in our five year plan which is very well aligned with SDGs the triple billion goals that WHO articulated last year and the triple billion goals are to get one billion more people on universal health coverage one billion more people better protected from health emergencies and one billion more people living their lives so it's not just a question of protecting from disease or treating disease but really about well well being and how do you keep people are going to live longer but they also need to be able to live healthy especially towards the the latter part of of their lives the experiences in some countries could be very useful for for others as I mentioned some countries have been quite progressive in dealing with the issues of of digital health and AI partnerships and collaborations are going to be critical also and and we need to consider what solutions to bring to countries which are at various stages of income and development so the same solution that applies in a high income country may not be relevant at all for a low-income country and vice versa so I think the dialogue needs to happen with the end users with the ministries of health with the care providers in different settings and with the population to know what what they would like so we're going to be having many more of these conversations with with all of you and especially with our partner the ITU we've been discussing where the focus group should really areas should be looking at and I think you'll hear more from Thomas and some of the other speakers on today's panel and we look forward to your inputs and guidance and and ideas as we take this work forward together thank you very much