 Good morning, your Excellencies, distinguished participants, ladies and gentlemen. First of all, before I start my speech, I would like to thank the organizers for inviting me to this session for giving the keynote speech. It's my sincere honor and pleasure to participate in this symposium for global standards. Cities, as you know, take up 3% of the land's earth's surface today. Yet they accommodate a majority of the human population and they also generate more than 80% of the economic output. And they also generate 60 to 80% of greenhouse gas emissions, including carbon dioxide. So essentially cities and communities in general, the urban areas today are the epicenters of our social economic and also environmental challenges globally. In this context, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, referred to as SDGs, commonly referred to as SDGs, essentially formulated a common unified global agenda for all nations and in turn for cities also, because this is where all our challenges are manifested. So, and these SDGs reflect the needs and expectations of the peoples around the world. In addition to UN SDGs, we also have the Paris Agreement, recognizing climate change as a threat, and it's established an international legally binding treaty for almost 200 nations today as a global agenda. So if you combine the UN SDGs and also the Paris Agreement, essentially the cities have a very well defined common global agenda to achieve in the coming years. Definitely the UN SDGs are for this decade, but also until the middle of the century, we have the issues regarding the climate change as well. So that essentially establishes the common globally unified agenda. But in addition to that, cities also have their own particular challenges, specific aspects that need to be addressed. So it's very important to identify the peoples actual needs and expectations in the cities, formulate them, and add those challenges almost to the global common unified agenda. So for cities there is a common essentially global agenda, but right below it there is also a specific agenda that drives their transformation in their urban environments. So how can digital transformation enable this agenda for cities? If you look at digital transformation or digitalization in general, essentially it forms a very strong and powerful tool for cities to utilize. As they try to accomplish their agenda pertaining to global common one and also the local challenges that they have. So today by utilizing digitalization and digital transformation, we can sensor urban data, we can analyze it, we can even simulate outcomes for cities. We can make predictions, we can also prescribe solutions that they can adopt for achieving or implementing their urban agendas. So digital transformation essentially plays an enormous opportunity for accomplishing the agendas of the urban environments. In addition to that, digital transformation also can play a very strong tool, can act as a very strong tool to understand the needs of the citizens and residents in cities by utilizing engagement tools, participation tools. So it forms almost the basis for the transformation, but also for understanding the needs of the transformation particular to the cities themselves. So it's a very powerful tool that we can use. So we have the agenda on one side and then we also have the tools that can solve this problem. So how can we put these two together to make this transformation viable and successful at the end? There are two things that I want to highlight regarding that. The first one is the public policies and the second one is the standards that are required. So essentially if you look at the public policies, the city administrations need to endorse or adopt the public policies that will accomplish this transformation with respect to their urban agenda. So this is one side of it. And in that context I would like to mention the importance of U4SSC, the United for Smart Sustainable Cities Initiative, which is coordinated by ITU, UNEC and UNHUBITAT and supported by additional 14 UN agencies, which acts as a global platform to encourage public policymaking and to facilitate the use of ICTs for achieving this digital transformation in the context of smart and sustainable cities. So the U4SSC plays a major role when it comes to the public policy issues around digital transformation. And within the U4SSC in the last official meeting, a new thematic group is established called the digital transformation of people-oriented cities. So within that group, the thematic group aims to address various issues around digital transformation for people-oriented cities stemming from or ranging from measurement issues, KPIs, to different applications of digital transformation in cities, guidelines for net zero. So there's a wide variety of topics that will be addressed within the thematic group. And I'm humbled to be one of the co-chairs of this thematic group. And I would like to invite all the city administrative, interested city administrations, academia, and also practitioners and private sector solution providers to participate with us and formulate a framework almost a broad approach to digitally transforming cities which are oriented towards people's needs and expectations. So the first one that I mentioned was the public policies. The second issue that I want to discuss is the standards. Standards are also very important because I have mentioned that there's a global agenda, almost a common unified global agenda that applies to all the cities. So standards essentially are commonly agreed, documents, methods that cities can adopt, frameworks that cities can adopt to implement their own urban agenda. Within the context of standards, I would like to mention the ITUT, which is the standardization bureau of ITU, which essentially undertakes their activities around standardization. And within the ITU, I would like to mention also study group 20, which is dedicated to IoT and smart sustainable cities and communities, where various issues pertaining to digital transformation are actually addressed within the study group itself, all the way from architectures to interoperability, security, evaluation and assessment. So there's a wide variety of issues that are handled within the ITUT study group 20. These are all very much applicable within the context of digital transformation for cities. I'm also happy to indicate that three major standards development organizations, IEC, ISO and ITU have partnered to form the joint smart cities task force for further collaboration for digital transformation in order to achieve smart cities and communities. And it's a very actually a positive development in the sense that major standards organizations are coming together to avoid overlaps and to also accelerate the development of standards for the benefit of cities in the future. And we look forward to even collaborating with other actually standards development organizations, since the common agenda that we are all facing against cities are very important and we have almost no margin to have overlaps or creating efficiencies in terms of developing our standards. Last but not the least, I also want to mention one more important issue. So we said we have the global agenda, we use digital transformation to address these, and I also mentioned two things to make it happen, the public policies and also the standards. But especially if you think about the common agenda and the common standards, there's actually an enormous potential and economic potential for cities to capture, which is that these standards the common standards and the common agenda enable also common markets almost across the globe, spanning all the cities. So there's a common market in terms of event, which creates an enormous economic opportunity for the common supply also across the world. In other words, instead of creating point solutions which solve only a specific, let's say a challenge or an issue in a city. The common issues that we have create a big potential for private sector for economies for economic sectors to undertake by creating supply markets that not only apply to a single city, but probably across the world, since we have a common agenda common goals common objectives to achieve, especially in these challenging economically challenging times, and due to the pandemic itself which was exacerbated. There is a big economic opportunity to achieve this people oriented agenda, while also sustaining the city itself in terms of sustainability but also sustaining the economy that that provides solutions to these urban problems. I would like to conclude my speech. And once again, I thank all the organizers for giving me the opportunity to address yourselves and also I wish you very productive and fruitful discussions and deliberations for the remainder of today. Thank you very much.