 Welcome to the World Summit on the Information Society 2016 in Geneva, Switzerland. And I am delighted to be joined by Dr. Asher Bin Bisha, who is the Director-General of the Smart Dubai Office. Please tell me, I know that it's a big project, building a smart city. Can you tell me what your office does? Thank you for hosting me here today. Smart city project is not something new, especially in Dubai. We started this 16 years ago by establishing E-government as a strategy and as a agenda for the whole city. But after 16 years, it wasn't enough only to transform the government. We want to transform the whole city, wherein we bring together with us the private sector. In our region, it has always been known that the government drives all these transforming projects, but it's time to also the private sector play a major role with us. So the office basically mandated to govern, unify, strategize, and put policies in place to make sure that the agenda to transform the city to a smart city is in place. Sorry, but Dubai is already smart when you see different components of the city. We already have the smartest, longest metro system. We have smart grids, we have smart meters, we have smart parking, we have a smart hospital. But again, it is not enough for us. We want to make sure that our residents and visitors at the heart of such transformation, that's why our vision to make Dubai the happiest and smartest city. And indeed, because we've heard that there are smart cities with transport links or environment links, but this is really a holistic approach, if I understand it. Absolutely. Working very closely with the ITU, we took the European framework, where there are six dimensions, smart mobility, smart environment, smart governance, smart economy, smart living, and smart people, but also adding the seventh layer, which is a horizontal layer to make sure that all these six layers are enabled, which is a smart ICT dimension. As I said, when you look into every dimension in our city, in Dubai, it is already smart. But by building that horizontal layer, we make sure that the services are efficiently and seamlessly integrated with each other. And we are focusing more into providing an impactful experience for our residents and visitors. And indeed, as you say, it's all about making sure that they're happy. I have to ask you, though, how do you monitor happiness? For us, we are mandated to provide very high standard services, both from government and private sector. But we want to sustain that happiness moments, which is difficult today. If you give me a gift, I'll be happy. But tomorrow, maybe with different variables around me, I won't be happy. So we want to make sure that this happiness is sustained across our city. One of the exercises that we've done is to launch smart, launch happiness meter. Wherein we placed this dashboard of a very simple, clean dashboard with three faces, either you are happy or neutral or unhappy, to measure your experience and to every touch point where in the resident or visitor interact with the city. And by this, at least, we will measure the heat of happiness across the city, which will give us indication why people are not happy in this area. Then we'll go down and drill down more to figure out what's happened there in that area or why people are more happier during evening time than morning time or why they are much happier on Monday, not on Friday, for instance. So this tool was an initial tool to allow us to see how is the happiness experience across the city. And many more modules will be added to this meter. For instance, the sentiment algorithm that captured from social media to know exactly if people are really happy or not. And more and more. Actually, we are trying also to work very closely with the academia because now there is something called happiness science. And we want to know exactly how the literature is taking place when it comes to happiness science and make sure that we implement all these new hypotheses around happiness in our city. Well, that's absolutely fascinating. And I understand that also you have been chosen as the first smart key city for key performance indicators. So you're going to be a model for other smart cities around the world. Actually, again, we have very ambitious and entrepreneur leaders in Dubai. So the ruler, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Barash, had mandated us to be the smartest city. So we need to compare ourselves, who's other in this game. So once you come to KPIs, ITU were the only body that recognized this is a new industry called the smart city industries. And we need to put standards around it, standard around what type of technologies, what type of infrastructure, the data, and all these kind of terms that have been used around smart cities. So we worked very closely with them to see how things are progressed in ITU and how we can play a major role. We want to be a lighthouse when it comes to smart cities because we believe you've done a lot. And we want to share that knowledge with others. That's why that journey with ITU started with an MOU last year selecting Dubai as a pilot city to implement smart city KPIs. It is a two-year journey. We've completed the first phase. Actually, last week was the result announcement in Malaysia. And hopefully, in two weeks' time, we will start the second phase of that exercise with the ITU. The ultimate goal is to come up with an index that cities can start relating to and make sure that they have the elements that they can start the journey of smart cities. Dr. Aisha Bin Bashir, Director General of the Smart Dubai office, thank you very much for shedding light on many of the projects that you are doing in Dubai to make people happy. Thank you. And do tune in to the ITU YouTube channel for many of the interviews that we are doing with key players in the information communication and technology industries and those who are trying to create information societies around the world.