 Hello and welcome to the AI for Good Global Summit here in Geneva. Our guest today is Belal Jamoussi, who is Chief of Study Group Department at the ITU. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for the opportunity. So tell me what your work involves and how that relates into the summit. So my work really as Chief of Study Groups Department is to look after all the study groups that develop international standards. Among them are focus groups. Many of them are working on AI. And so my role in ITU is very much interrelated with the summit and takes a lot of the conversations from the summit into the next level of detailed analysis and preparation of international standards in the ITU. And why is it important do you think that everyone should be involved in the AI conversation? AI is complex. It's new in terms of being implementable today. As a theory, it's been around for many years, but as an implementable technology, it is fairly new. We initiated the summit in 2017 to start the conversation and bring all the stakeholders around the table. And we're very excited that this edition is bringing thousands of experts, but not only experts, but also policy makers, diplomats, civil society researchers. So everyone needs to be around the table because AI touches every aspect of our life. There are many applications of AI to increase or accelerate achieving the sustainable development goals. And we cannot do it alone. This requires all the UN system and that's why we have 40 partners in the AI for Good Summit. And it requires the private sector that is innovating and developing solutions today. They need the guidance. They need to have the dialogue with the policy makers to make sure that we shape AI in a sustainable, transparent way that takes into account many of the principles of good technology to serve humanity. As you say, a whole host of people right across all the different sectors. How is AI influencing ITU standardization work? And how do you see this progressing? AI has really transformed the way we develop standards and the topics on which we work on standards. First, I'll start with the topics. In 2018, when we had the summit edition, it was clear that AI for Health is an important topic. It was important not only for ITU but especially for WHO. So we partnered then on creating a focus group on AI for Health to study a number of diseases that can be cured through using artificial intelligence and smart phones. But those AI applications needed to be validated by the medical community and the digital community. And we needed to develop ethical guidelines on using the data, the medical data. We needed to bring the regulators of the medical field around the table. So over the past five years, we were able to create a community of experts from both fields, medical and digital, and to draft a number of prestandards, documents, and also write software and code and start collecting data because AI without data is meaningless. And we were very pleased yesterday to have the announcement of the Global Initiative on AI for Health that was inaugurated by Dr. Tedros, the WHO DG, Doreen Bogdan-Martin, our Secretary General, and the Assistant Director General of WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization. So this shows how important it is to work together and it shows how AI is impacting on the topics that the ITU is working on. The ITU today is 158 years old. We started with standards on the telegraph, but the technology has evolved. We are today working on AI for health, AI for agriculture, AI for natural disaster management, AI for road safety. So the field of application of AI is tremendous and it has a significant positive impact. It's really why many of our study groups and many of the focus groups that we have in the ITU are working on the AI applications, as I mentioned in all of these fields. Interesting. Maybe another one in terms of also the transformation on our standards making process. We have been using AI to make our standards development process more accessible to developing countries. Today, if you visit any of the ITU webpages, they are automatically translated into six languages of the UN. As you know, translation is quite cost-prohibitive. We cannot translate everything through humans, but for those webpages and for those documents where it's okay to get it 80%, 90% accurate, the accessibility of the information in the languages of our membership is more important than the 100% accuracy. So we've been using AI to translate our documents, webpages. We've been using AI to map our work to the sustainable development goals to the 17 SDGs. We have been using AI to automate some of the messages that we use in our meetings. Last telecom standards advisory group, instead of having one of the staff member announce the rules of the game in terms of remote participation and its impact on interpretation, we used an avatar that read the document and it was quite well received by all the participants. How was that received? It was extremely well received and it saved time and it was accurate and this time we did it in English. But then we immediately had feedback from a number of participants. They said it doesn't cost you much to do it in English and all the other six languages. So that's what we'll do in the future to be able to have the avatar speak in multiple languages and each can listen in there. That will become a regular event, will it? Exactly. So AI is tremendous. It has a profound impact on the way we develop standards and also on the type of standards that we develop. Interesting. Why is AI capacity building so important? I mean, you touched on earlier and how is ITU's standardization arm supporting this? It is so important and it's imperative because otherwise it will widen the digital divide. Today we have 2.7 billion unconnected people. If we don't address AI from an inclusive perspective and ensure that everyone participates and has the capacity to participate, AI will widen the digital divide. So in the ITU we've been working on bridging the standardization gap to ensure that more and more member states and private sector from developing countries participate in the standard setting process. So we've been training engineers and regulators from developing countries to know how to write contributions to the ITU, how to defend them and how to generate consensus, build consensus at the international scene. That is on the standards development side but also in terms of implementing the standards. Once they are out there, how can member states and private sector in developing countries be part of the game, the ecosystem and implement these standards? So it's important that capacity building takes place on both fronts. We are very encouraged to see more and more universities from developing countries join us because many countries don't have the companies that build the big telecom gear but they have universities and they have small and medium enterprises. We have many small and medium enterprises joining the ITU, especially from developing countries to work on specific applications, IOT for smart cities for example, or certain security applications and so on. So that is the way to really build the capacity and make sure that we develop standards in an inclusive way across all of our member states and all the private sector and academia in our member states. It will be interesting to meet again in a year or even in four years time and see where that's all at now. Absolutely. It will be interesting to see. We have made some strides in inclusiveness. We used to have about 20 countries that participate. We are now around 40 member states. We used to have 20% women participation in standards. Now we are around 30%. So the inclusiveness is increasing thanks to a focused program, a resource program to really build the capacity and to increase the awareness of the importance of inclusiveness. And we cannot stop here. There is a lot more work to be done. We're encouraged by a few member states and private sector that has been funding our Bridging the Standardization Gap program because it's quite cost prohibitive and that will help us to bring more experts to our meetings and to also go and have the meetings in the regions to have the meetings in the regional languages when we have regional groups and also work on the implementation of financial inclusion on smart sustainable cities and on topics that are of importance today to our membership on the application of AI in healthcare. We are very encouraged by the Butnar Foundation, for example, that has been supporting increasing inclusiveness and diversity in AI for Health. And we are also one of our partners in this new global initiative on AI for Health. So philanthropy is going to be playing an important role in making AI accessible to all and really to allow us to build the capacity back to your question. And just on that note then, the UN Secretary General's message to the summit stressed that human rights, transparency and accountability must light the way as we develop and deploy AI. How are standards going to develop to promote this, do you think? We had two roundtables at the summit. One with our UN partners yesterday, 40 agencies, plus the private sector and researchers on this very topic in terms of governance of AI. And it was a very fruitful discussion because we need that exchange between what the private sector is doing, what the regulators and the UN is doing. And today we had another roundtable with ambassadors. We had 70 ambassadors from Geneva who all have been asked by capital in terms of what is the implication of AI, what's the summit doing and how the dialogue could be enriched. So those three principles that the UN Secretary General mentioned were guiding our discussion. And today I also had the opportunity to join the Human Rights Council discussion in the Palais des Nations. We had a session that was organized by the High Commissioner, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. And we had a very interesting dialogue on the interplay between standards and human rights. This is a topic that the ITU leadership is committed to at all levels from the secretariat but also in terms of our membership. Since last year we've engaged in a number of roundtables organized by ambassadors here in Geneva but at the IGF meeting with the Office of the Human Rights High Commissioner. And this year we, the ITU, convened the World Standards Cooperation which includes IEC, ISO and ITU, the three international standards organizations in Geneva at the leadership level, at the president and the secretary general and the secretariat level. And we invited the High Commissioner on Human Rights, Dr. Volker Turk, to give a presentation on the interplay between digital technologies and standards. He has done a wonderful job in explaining it, demystifying it to the leadership of the standards organizations to the point that we all agreed, all three organizations agreed to take that message to our chairman of the study groups and focus groups, the technical committees in ISO and IEC that are developing the standards so that they include, because usually engineers, when we develop standards, we look at the technical viability, the product has to work. We also look at the economic viability because companies are building products that they need to sell, so it has to make sense economically. And we stopped there. But now with this conversation that was kicked off at the World Standards Council, we added a third lens, third criteria, which is the human rights viability. This was the message I was just sharing a few minutes ago at the Palais de Nation here in Geneva with our colleagues from OHCR and a number of other ambassadors participating. This is what is guiding now our game plan and the three organizations to take that message to the chairman of the study groups and then from there to the participants. So all of the chairs agreed to share the speech of the high commissioner and also the guidance on including this lens of human rights to all the experts in the 11 study groups that we have and the thousands of experts working in the ITU so that we raise the awareness and we invite and encourage the participation of the human rights expert also in the standards process either through their national delegation or through their organization if it's a member of ITU or they could also be invited as an expert by the chair of the group which is another technique or a door that we have in being inclusive and multi-stakeholder in the ITU standards development process. So it is a very encouraging wave. Next week we have the ITU council and the ITU council also has this report of the Human Rights Council report on the standards resolution 4723 of the Human Rights Council and we had a multi-country contribution really commanding the ITU for the effort it has been doing to include human rights in terms of our conversation and how it's inclusive to ensure that all countries participate in standards development but also the technology that we develop includes the human rights aspect in its process. So important. A huge amount of work being done behind the scenes. Thank you so much for your insights today. Bilal, Jamoussi, thank you so much for sharing your time with us. Pleasure. More to come on the AI for Good Global Summit here in Geneva.