 Hello everyone. It's a real pleasure to be able to join you for this virtual G-Stick conference. Let me take a moment to congratulate the team at IEEE for bringing this amazing event together in very challenging times. My name is Doreen Bogdan-Martin and I serve as Director of Telecommunications Development at the International Telecommunications Union, or ITU. For those of you who don't know us, ITU is the UN Agency for Digital Technologies. We're based in Geneva, Switzerland and we've been at the heart of advances in communications for more than 150 years from the earliest days of the telegraph to the invention of the telephone, communications satellites, mobile telephony, and most recently the internet and the worldwide web. When the IEEE team approached me to speak at this event, I was delighted that they wanted to focus on the role of digital technologies in efforts to meet the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, or STGs. In light of the UN Secretary General's recently launched roadmap for digital cooperation and as we now look towards forging a new normal for the post-COVID world, we have all been forced to consider what it really means to be unconnected in this increasingly post-digital age. The world is not sure how and when we're going to be COVID-19, but at long last, one thing I think the whole world now is sure about is the vital importance of connectivity. For those of us joining this session today, digital technology has been helping us ensure that our lives continue as normally as possible during this unprecedented crisis. It's helping us work and stay in close touch with loved ones. It's keeping us entertained, enabling us to acquire the goods we need online, and it's been allowing our children to continue learning in the face of mass classroom closures. Put simply, none of us participating in this conference could imagine our lives without the internet. So I'd like us to pause just for one moment and remember that we are the very lucky few. Right now, every second person on the planet has never, ever accessed the internet. These 3.6 billion have no choice but to struggle to find ways to survive without the vital lifeline that digital technologies offer. Ladies and gentlemen, sometimes it takes a crisis like COVID to remind us how profoundly transformational an internet connection can be. The UN Sustainable Development Goals and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development were forged on the conviction that all people must enjoy equal access to the same opportunities. When the world signed up to this agenda, our pledge was simple. Leave no one behind. And COVID has shown us in no uncertain terms that in today's world, leaving no one behind means leaving no one offline. There is no doubt in my mind that universal digital connectivity is the vital catalyst we so urgently need to dramatically accelerate progress towards the 17 SDGs. At ITU, we're working on many different fronts in countries all around the world to help extend digital access to unconnected communities. Getting equipment in is important, but it's not just about infrastructure. We also need to ensure that networks and services are physically available, are financially affordable, and are accessible and actionable by the people who need them. For tech developers, that means designing and developing services and platforms that respond effectively to target demographics. For example, prioritizing voice interfaces, local languages, and icon-based navigation if literacy is an issue. For ITU, it means helping governments assess infrastructure needs. It means working with regulators to forge enabling environments that stimulate uptake while keeping prices down. It means a lot of work to promote digital inclusion so that people are empowered to take advantage of new services and platforms as they become available. One project that we're particularly excited about is Giga, a new partnership with UNICEF and others to connect every school on the planet to the Internet and every young person to information, opportunity, and choice. Let me say right at the outset that we know that computers cannot replace teachers, but we also know that the Internet is the most amazing, most accessible library ever conceived. Connecting students and teachers to this wealth of information in languages they can understand could be the most powerful engine of transformation that the world has ever seen. And having a broadband Internet connection would mean that no child need ever again to lose access to schooling, even in the midst of a pandemic like the one that we're living through right now. The Giga project is ambitious, but just look at the global demographics. For me, these figures clearly show us that linking young people to the power of digital technologies will be absolutely vital to achieving the development outcomes that we want. The Giga project tackles the problem of basic education, but what if we try to apply digital technologies to transform an entire community? I want to show you an example of a new project that takes a holistic approach to digital with the aim of transforming the lives of people in one of the poorest nations on Earth. The Niger 2.0 Smart Villages project uses low-cost VSAT technology to connect two villages east and west of the capital, Niamh. A local Wi-Fi hotspot links to a microserver charged with locally appropriate Wikipedia information, which is regularly updated. Innovative apps have been mounted on tablets as plug-and-play solutions and handed out to local people to introduce and support digital education, digital health, and digital agriculture. Local healthcare workers use the tablets for telemedicine and e-health services, and teachers use them in the classroom where access to printed learning resources is extremely limited. Community information is being made available via an innovative talking book device that's loaded with pre-recorded information and available at the top of a finger. Let's take a quick look at what this innovative and ambitious project might mean for local people. The Niger 2.0 Smart Village project has set out to significantly improve the lives of people in rural Niger, achieving clear milestones in meeting sustainable development goals. Key Nigerian government agencies, such as the Ministry of Health, Education and Agriculture, have coordinated efforts in a so-called whole-of-government approach to achieve the long-term goals of the Smart Village project. The National Agency for the Information Society, ANSI, is at the forefront. UN agencies, such as the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, UNESCO, and the International Telecommunication Union, under the one UN umbrella, along with NGOs, such as the Digital Impact Alliance, Université numérique francophone mondiale, and Terre des Hommes are assisting with their expertise in providing both hardware and digital applications. Innovative apps mounted on tablets as plug-and-play solutions have been prepared for distribution in rural communities to introduce and support e-education, e-health and e-agriculture. I think this is a really inspiring snapshot of the transformational power of digital at grassroots level. But ITU's research shows that even within communities, ensuring everyone gets access to digital opportunities means really zooming in on the needs of traditionally marginalized groups, like the elderly, persons with disabilities, and, of course, girls and women. Globally, 17 percent fewer women and girls have online access compared with their male counterparts. And sadly, this digital gender divide is most pronounced in the world's least-developed countries where technology could be its most powerful, but where only one in seven women is using the Internet. ITU's actions to remedy this imbalance include large multi-stakeholder coalitions like the Equals Global Partnership for Gender Equality in the Digital Age, joint action programs like our work with our sister agencies, UN Women, UNICEF, and others on Generation Equality, the focused workshops and coding camps we run with regional partners as part of our Girls Can Code program, and our annual Girls in ICT Day, a global event founded back in 2010, which is now celebrated by 170 countries around the world. Girls in ICT Day is a way for countries, companies, and civil society to throw the spotlight on the many exciting opportunities a career in the ICT sector can offer. To date, we've reached almost 400,000 girls and young women through 11,000 events held all around the world. Ladies and gentlemen, many of the activities I've outlined today are about bringing the power of today's technologies to underserved communities. But what about the promise of future technologies? As engineers and techies, many of you will have spotted a missing part of the equation, and that is the importance of innovation. At ITU, activities to support and foster local innovation is one area that we've been ramping up aggressively since our last World Telecommunications Development Conference in 2017 and our Plenty Potentiary Conference in 2018, where our members made innovation one of our core strategic goals. To respond to this new priority, we've developed a special program to assist countries at the grassroots level to establish and grow local tech hubs and foster digitally focused national innovation ecosystems. The coronavirus crisis has reminded us how critical entrepreneurship-driven innovation is for economic growth and digital inclusion. And that's why in June, we were proud to announce a brand new partnership with the UAE to launch a cutting-edge center of digital innovation, to be known as iCody. And that's why each year we host our prestigious Global Innovation Challenge. We really developed from the tech perspective using the platform. The comments that I got on the food bag helped me. They were providing the perspectives that I didn't look from before, so I was like, oh, I never even thought to include this into my model or I never thought to go onto this platform. At this time of enormous social and economic upheaval, the global tech sector will benefit enormously from greater global diversity. We want bright young teams in developing countries right around the world to start building the apps and the services that will be meaningful to their local communities. We've already seen the phenomenal global success of mobile money services pioneered in Africa. We need to empower more countries to nurture this kind of homegrown tech culture that can deliver compelling and relevant services in appropriate formats and local languages. Looking even further ahead, emerging machine learning applications have enormous potential as game changers for developing countries. That's what spurred ITU to launch the AI for Good Global Summit, which each year brings together leading tech pioneers working on new applications to solve some of the world's most urgent problems. Let's take a look at what the future might hold. We face extraordinary challenges in the 21st century. Nine and a half billion people alive in 2050. We don't know how we will provide them clean water, sustainable energy, energy education. There are serious problems with the environment. There are serious problems with bigotry. There are serious problems with poverty and starvation. So far we've been unsuccessful in figuring out a way to fix them. I'm hoping that AI can adjust the various factors in a way that maybe can solve these problems. The real opportunity for AI is how we can actually help the 7 billion people that could benefit from these technologies in a practical way. While we can't say AI is general magic, it is giving us core tools to start putting in place systems that we know will help with key issues like hunger, famine, epidemics, overall health and well-being. AI offers an extraordinary possibility of accelerating solutions in the time we have to solve the problems. We are now applying artificial intelligence to the art of farming. A very old industry also adopting the latest in technology. So through artificial intelligence, a farmer can now integrate massive sources of data, whether it's data from the combines, it's weathered satellite data, it's data from the fields, taking all that data together and through an artificial intelligence solution actually making recommendations to the farmer on how he can increase the production of his land. AI has enormous capacity and potential to solve problems that require an enormous amount of computing and patent recognition that human beings struggle with. The way drugs are going to be designed in the future, and again already starting to be, is by having models of the molecules and how they interact, for example, with, say, you know, the virus proteins and then doing a search to find the best drug for the best problem. I think this, for example, how are we going to cure cancer? You should be able to walk into your doctor's office. Your doctor should be able to sequence your entire genome. Take that along with your medical imaging data. Compare that with the world's data of genome sequences and medical imaging data. From that, determine the matches between your tumor and others. What the treatments were in those other cases and the outcome. Did the patient survive or not? And from that, devise for you your personalized treatment and do that entire process in just one day. It's completely possible through artificial intelligence. The UN summit and its goals excite me, in particular with the idea of leveraging what I would call sleeping giants of data. We have accumulated so much data in the world and with some refinement and some tagging, this data can become available and leverage to address famine, to address human trafficking, to address vicious cycles of economic poverty. If you make progress in AI, you make progress in all these different fields at the same time. So bear a machine learning algorithm. If I invent it tomorrow, it will make for better medical diagnosis. It will make for better self-driving cars and all those what else. AI is potentially the most powerful technology that we've ever created and it's going to create the next form of civilization. It's not happening in 10 years or 15 years. It's happening right now. I hope these few short videos have convinced you of the powerful transformational effect that new and emerging digital technologies can have on our efforts to achieve global equality. Ladies and gentlemen, in the age of unprecedented technological innovation, we live in a world where many billions are still denied the basic opportunity to connect. These people are increasingly isolated from a world that is evolving without the benefit of their participation and their unique contribution. And we are all of us much poorer for their absence. I truly believe that technology is the most powerful tool humanity has ever had to break down barriers and bring us closer together. Our shared task is to change the picture so that this becomes this. Because only when everyone is connected to the power of digital can we be truly sure of fulfilling that vision to leave no one behind. Thank you.