 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this opening press conference for the 47th World Economic Forum Annual Meeting. Just a reminder to everyone in the room, if you could please do what I've done and set your cell phone to silent. That would be very much appreciated. Welcome to everyone joining online. My colleagues from the Managing Board and the Founder and Executive Chairman of the Forum, Professor Klaus Schwab. I'm going to take us through some of the themes and highlights of this year's annual meeting, which is convening under the theme of Responsible and Responsive Leadership, just to introduce them briefly. They're Rick Sammons, Cheryl Martin, Professor Schwab, Emma Ben-Amur and Philippe Brossler. And you'll be hearing from each of them. There'll be opportunities for questions at the end. And we will also have an opportunity for people watching online to ask questions too. So without further ado, I'm going to ask Professor Schwab to introduce this year's 47th World Economic Forum Annual Meeting. Professor Schwab. Thank you, Adrian. And good afternoon and a very cordial welcome to everybody. Let me start with a quote. Economic globalization has entered the critical phase. A mounting backlash against its effects, especially in industrial democracies, is threatening a very disruptive impact on economic activity and social stability in many countries. The mood in these democracies is one of helplessness and anxiety, which helps explain the rise of a new brand of populist politicians. All these confronts political and economic leaders with the challenge of demonstrating how the new global capitalism can function to the benefit of the majority and not only for corporate leaders and investors. The globalized economy must not become synonymous with free market on the rampage. A breakless train working havoc. So social responsibility of corporations and governments remain as important as ever. There can be no sustainable growth without the public at large seeing itself as a major stakeholder in the successful functioning of the economy. This is a quote of an article of an editorial which I have written 21 years ago. Quoting this article, I just want to express it's not only now where we as a World Economic Forum feel that economic development has always to be coupled with social progress and social responsibility. It was actually the origin of the World Economic Forum to create a consciousness of the global community that economic activities always have to be coupled with social responsibility. I just want to remind you it was the multi-stakeholder concept which was at the origin of the forum. So this is an introduction into the annual meeting 2017. We hope that the world will listen more to this message as it has done during the last years. For this reason, we also have given as a title to the annual meetings this year, Responsive and Responsible Leadership. What does it mean? It means that as a leader, you have to be responsive. You have to listen. You have to interact with those people who have entrusted you with leadership. But it's not enough to listen. You also have to act. You have to be responsible. You have to be courageous enough to take the decisions to what we call improving the state of the world and the needs sometimes very courageous decisions. In the framework of this title, we have defined four major tracks for the annual meeting, but they are all interrelated. The first track is actually how to reinvigorate global economic growth. We are at the moment stuck with the gross rate of around 3% and maybe a little bit better next year, but this is not enough to solve the major challenges which we have in the world, such as social inclusion or the lack of social inclusion, such as use and employment. Just think of use and employment in Africa, for example. So it's absolutely necessary to create sustained, stronger gross rates. Just imagine with 3% as we have now, global economy is growing only or doubling GDP only every 24 years with 5% as we happened to have before the crisis. It was every 15 years. So we need to reinvigorate global gross rates. The second pillar of the program is to ensure that market capitalism is more inclusive. Every market economy will produce winners and losers, but the system will only be sustainable if there is enough solidarity between the winners and the losers. That's the second pillar. The third pillar, of course, is the fourth industrial revolution, and it was the main theme at the annual meeting this year. But if I look back when I have written this book, if I look back to one year ago, many things which at that time I considered to be science fiction or people considered science fiction have become already reality. Just think about the discussion about artificial intelligence, self-driving cars becoming a reality, like blockchain which was nearly not known, and all those technologies will have a tremendous impact not only on the economy but on society, particularly as far as job markets are concerned. And the fourth pillar, maybe the most important pillar, is the reimagining of global cooperation. We are living in a different world. The world today is multi-polar, geopolitically, we have to adapt to this new context, but to have at the same time to reinforce our global ties, because I'm always surprised to see the discussion on globalization and de-globalization. Of course, we have to make sure that our markets, as I mentioned before, become more fair, but they also have to remain open, because we are a global community, interconnected, interdependent, and if we do not address our common issues as a global community, we all will fail. It's not a, it's all win or all lose situation. I would like to draw your attention to this paper here which is called A Call for Responsive and Responsible Leadership. It describes in detail the positioning and the four pillars of the annual meeting. Let me share with you also something which particularly in the context of global cooperation is of essential importance. It is the fact that we will have as the opening speakers this year President Xi Jinping from the People's Republic of China, who will be accompanied by a strong delegation of political and business leaders. I think this is significant in many aspects. Now, the annual meeting in Davos is not a meeting where you go to and you listen to speeches. It's actually a working meeting. It's part of a working process which is actually a year-long process and Davos is prepared by many, many task forces and work groups. And you find in, I don't want to go into the details, but I just want to draw your attention to this very intensive, very comprehensive document which is called World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2017 Systems Initiatives. Actually what we feel is very essential in the world of today is, as I mentioned, to address the root causes of the problems we are in, of the challenges which we have. Much, too much time at the moment is absorbed by crisis management. Who is looking really at the future? So that's a unique role of the World Economic Forum to look at the future in a systemic way. And you will see we have bundled our efforts in terms of systems approach, where we look at the future of the health system, the future of the production system, the future of economic policies which bring social inclusion. And you will find here all the details, but also the many-fold initiatives we have undertaken, and we are working on inclusive all the sessions which are related to those 15 specific initiatives in Davos. So the annual meeting in some way is unique because it provides the global community at the beginning of the year to take stock of the state of the world, to reflect on where we are, and also to define solutions for the problems which we face. But the annual meeting is unique in a different way. It's a global multi-stakeholder summit. And here, my colleagues will certainly elaborate more, but I just want to draw your attention to the many non-political and business leaders who are participating in Davos. In the media usually you read about the stars, the business stars, the governmental stars. For me, the stars are really the people who, let's say, sacrifice their lives for society as a social entrepreneur, as a cultural leader. We also have to listen to the young generation, just imagine the medium age of the world is 26. So those people are integrated, usually overseeing in, let's say, in the context of the overall Davos. So what we felt we should provide you with the series of those people to appreciate really what contributions they can do. And I would like to draw your attention to the document with the series of global shapers, of the social entrepreneurs, the people who bring the knowledge from the ground level to the discussions in Davos. The technology pioneers, it's not just the big companies in Davos, there are many people who actually are at the origin of groundbreaking new business models for tomorrow. And then the cultural leaders, the NGO leaders, the trade union leaders, you find more details in the documentation. And of course, in addition, one third of the participants do not come from the business and governmental community, but represent other walks of life. But of course, the business community with the CEOs of 1000 top companies in the world, and the political community with governmental delegations from over 70 countries is very well represented. I was told Davos is the most comprehensive ministerial meeting, because you do not have just ministers from finance or from trade, as it is usually of foreign affairs. It really reflects, and you will see in the list, the multidisciplinary approach which we have. I should mention that we also try not to be just global, but to link what's happening on a global level to regional concerns and national concerns. So we are engaged in many fold regional projects, which you also have in your document and which my colleague, Filip Reuslo, will certainly develop. Maybe one or two final remarks. First, you cannot have a meeting today without looking at the tragedy in Syria and other Iraq and so on. And the forum in Davos always had special, let's say, smaller meetings related to Syria. We will have it again this year. And as you also will see in the document, we have spent many, many hundreds of hours to make sure that humanitarian issues are well taken up in Davos in an innovative way where political and business leaders work together. Finally, I mentioned already the fourth industrial revolution. I just want to mention this is something where we are in the process of establishing a special center in San Francisco to look particularly at the need to develop principles for all those new technological revolutions and to look at social impacts. Now, maybe one last word. The meeting itself in Davos was prepared by many, many specialists. We had a preparatory meeting in Dubai attended by over 700 experts from different areas. Also interesting to note is it will be the first big international meeting. The new Secretary General of the UN will participate, which underlines our commitment also to the SDGs and to following up the COP decisions and agreements. All major international organizations will be represented in Davos. And I should add also all major sovereign wealth funds will be represented in Davos by the top personalities. Finally, to conclude, since the beginning, as I mentioned at the outset of my remarks, the world economy has been committed of combining economic development with social progress. Without economic development, social progress is not possible and without social and without social progress, economic development is not sustainable. I have added, by the way, the article of 86 in the document. I'm also pleased to say that we are so much recognizing the need of new concepts. The world of tomorrow, we are at some kind of a turning point of history. We need new concepts. We do not have solutions or the intellectual concepts for everything which we confront. We need new concepts. And for this reason, I have, of course, we will present in Davos some aspects for new concepts, but we have to be modest. And I think we should also provide the young generation with a possibility even more to make a contribution. For this reason, I have decided to use so many which I personally got through awards, like some more awards for social entrepreneurship or also the receipts from this book. It corresponds to 500,000 Swiss francs last year to use this money and to create a special award system for the young generation to contribute with new innovative ideas to look at action-oriented solutions for tomorrow. Finally, you may be overwhelmed by the complexity of the annual meeting. You see so many documents. I have to apologize. The documents were developed partially at the last moment, so they are not completely in the order of what you see in the press release. But let's face it. Every simplified approach to deal with the global complex agenda is condemned to fail. We cannot have just populist solutions. And definitely the problems which we face technologically, economically, socially and politically, they are so tremendous. Sustainable solutions require a systemic, holistic approach, and theorists require particularly the collaboration of all global stakeholders united in one mission, improving the state of the world. Thank you. Professor Roth, thank you very much. As you mentioned, Davos is a working meeting over a number of days, and a lot of the work that's done there is building on things that have happened through the year, and it's also followed up afterwards at meetings and roundtables around the world. My colleague Rick Sammons is tasked with organizing and developing a lot of that work. Rick, can you elaborate on some of the things that are going to be highlighted in Davos, featuring the forums, work streams and initiatives, and just explain a little bit about how we convene people and what we do to advance some of the issues that we think are important. With pleasure, Adrian. Welcome, everyone. You have in your press release a lot of statistics about the forums annual meeting in a way that's Davos by the numbers. Let me give you a few statistics that would, if you will, be the forum, the world economic forum as an institution, as an international organization for public private cooperation by the numbers, reflecting what my colleague Adrian has just emphasized, and that is that we're a platform for a round the year series of strategic work processes. At any given moment, we have a portfolio, a revolving portfolio of about 50 plus different projects, most of which are grouped within 14, what we call system initiatives, which are ecosystems of communities as well as work processes that can make a strategic difference for advancing progress on our issue, and I'll come back to that in a moment. Those work processes produced, for example, last year in the way of thought leadership, about 50 different reports, agenda shaping reports, governance frameworks, policy ideas, and the like, as well as 30 white papers. These are more upstream intellectual framework suggestions that then could evolve potentially into more specific work. Now, we are not only doing the work, but we're also bringing people together. I think this is at the core of the forum's contribution to the international community. We are this very unique constellation of multi-stakeholder, multi-disciplinary, cross-regional communities of leaders, leaders of institutions of various types, but also leaders of thinking, and in many cases, moral leadership as well. We combine that very unusual constellation of different leaders into these work processes, and we do so not just at our summit and say, for example, our annual meeting, but we have at least 10 or so summits a year in different regions, sometimes in specific countries, but moreover, we have a series of working meetings, workshops, and whatnot that correspond to these 14 system initiatives and the various projects. Last year, we held about approximately 150 meetings, and that goes, in other words, well beyond what we're going to witness next week in Davos. So that's, if you will, the World Economic Forum as an international organization mounting work processes of public-private cooperation by the numbers to complement what you have in your materials regarding the numbers corresponding to who's coming to the annual meeting. Now, let me characterize a bit first generally, and then more specifically, what some of this work is aimed at doing and what it accomplishes. Basically, there are three different types of outputs and outcomes from these kinds of work processes. The first and the most fundamental and should never be overlooked is facilitating dialogue to build trust and to expand the zone of common ground in a very complex world with people that come at issues from very different angles and often with very different language. And so having an informal dialogue, we are an informal international organization as opposed to a treaty-based purely intergovernmental organization. That informality is absolutely powerful in my experience in my history at this organization. Having an ability to speak directly without a lot of protocol and with directly with your peers, your leaders, with a lot of bureaucracy or staff in between. And to do so in an unusual configuration that you don't normally meet in the normal course of your industry's business or your ministry portfolio's business adds another dimension of effectiveness to the way that the world cooperates together. And so one of the three areas, one of the three ways in which our work processes seek to make a contribution is to simply provide that informal, creative, purpose-built space for informal dialogue and trust-building. The second area is, as I mentioned, is thought leadership, particularly in the domain of policy suggestions or governance suggestions. And when I'm here talking about policy and governance, I'm not speaking simply about public policy. A lot of the governance that needs to happen in the world today often needs to involve multiple stakeholders to get right. And often things can be very effective even if they're not enshrined into an international treaty. But there's still governance frameworks and there's still about policy. So we have a range of these 50 or so projects that are developing very specific ideas for improved governance, whether it be public or private. And then the third category of the nature of the work we do is quite simply action. We have a range of initiatives and projects that are essentially about building a new model of concrete cooperation for either scaling the extent of existing progress or creating new pockets of progress through a more innovative approach to blending the competencies and expertise of the business community, the intergovernmental community, the civil society community, the academic community, and the like. So that's dialogue, policy and governance, and action helps to explain essentially what we do. Now finally, let me give you a few specific examples that correspond to the four main areas that we're going to be anchoring the annual meeting program on this year mentioned by Professor Schwab. In terms of strengthening economic growth and improving or making more inclusive, our market-based economies are capitalist system, if you will. I'll flag two particular items. One is just last week we issued a report that's a product of our system initiative on education, gender, and work on realizing the human potential in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We all know that technology is challenging many labor markets. It's having an employment effect. It's having a dispersive effect on incomes and standards of living. And one of the most important things that can be done is to strengthen the investment in human capital formation in all of our societies. This piece of work is a product of what I just described earlier, a series of dialogues among various experts and stakeholders in three areas that are required to strengthen investment in human capital and people. Educational systems to adapt them to the current context. Secondly, technical and vocational education, a very under-emphasized area for many countries, not necessarily Switzerland, but many, many other countries in the world. And thirdly, a new and increasingly important area of our labor markets, and that is the care economy. As demographic aging cascades across advanced countries and into middle-income countries, there is a huge potential for labor-intensive employment, an employment that has a very positive social purpose in the care economy. That report provides not only a description of the importance of these areas, but also provides a basic framework for evaluating how a country is doing and what it could begin to do. Secondly, next week, we'll be issuing an important piece of work in the area of inclusive growth and development. We will be proposing, in effect, a new growth framework to better blend, better capture the synergies between broad social participation in the process and benefits of economic development, on the one hand, and growth itself. This is one of the most central issues, obviously, facing the world today. We'll also release, at that time, a new measurement framework for national economic progress that includes GDP per capita, which is the conventional way we measure economic development, but it extends to a range of other factors that are really important for how society evaluates the success of their economies. With respect to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we will have announced and discussed their two important pieces of work on some of the toughest issues today having to do with cyber security. The first is there'll be a best practice guide for what all boards of directors should be thinking about to ensure that their companies have up-to-date risk management in the handling of sensitive information, cyber security. Second of all, we'll have a framework, a set of guidelines for how the private sector and the public sector can share sensitive crime-related information that are appearing in their networks so that we can have a more rapid and effective response. And last, on Professor Schwab's point about trying to reinvigorate and even reimagine global cooperation, let me mention two quick points. 80% of the funds that are required to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals are actually having to do with infrastructure, sustainable infrastructure investment. And right now, the world doesn't have enough money in public budgets to fund that. The only solution to both achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and, by the way, achieving the Paris Climate Agreement objectives, which is also mainly about infrastructure, is to better blend the public and private capital in the world economy for this purpose. This is a win-win for the world, but right now there are impediments to that of behavior and policy and governance. And we will have an important summit between all of the Multilateral Development Bank presidents on the one hand and a range of CEOs of financial institutions and firms, other firms on the other to develop a specific action agenda and agree on it and to help to crack that particular problem. Maybe, given the shortness of time, I'll close by simply saying that all of this activity is intended to serve as a platform not only for the work that the forum guides or even executes and facilitates, but as a platform to scale on a distributed fashion, public-private cooperation of that type on a self-organizing basis among the various constituents who are involved in the forum. And so you'll see this reflected in the annual meeting next week that a range of our key partners and constituents will be coming together, making use of our platform to advance their work processes and make announcements. And I'll just flag one of them. The Business Commission on Sustainable Development will be issuing its report after a year-long process of thinking about how business interests and business practice intersect with the broader public agenda represented by the SDGs. Thank you very much. Rick, thank you. Thanks for that very extensive description of some of the the work that's going on. As you can see, there's a lot of thinking behind this meeting. If you can, Cheryl, could you just take us through the role of business in some of those work streams and just explain a little bit more about how business will feature in this 47th annual meeting? Absolutely. Thank you, Adrienne. Building on Rick's comments, I'm pleased to note that we're going to have over 1,800 business leaders from over 1,000 companies from across the globe attending this year's annual meeting. These leaders are excited about being in Davos, the ability to learn more about the impact of technologies from the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We have over 40 sessions just in our loft area alone that they'll be able to attend, but perhaps most importantly for them to engage in impact-oriented workshops on a wide range of issues from financial inclusion to technology disruption to building healthier lives. We're also pleased to acknowledge the three business leaders among our co-chairs this year, Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Frans Van Houten, CEO of Royal Phillips, and Brian Moynihan, Chairman and CEO of Bank of America. So let me give you a couple examples real quickly about some of the project areas part of these system initiatives where we see business playing a very critical role and consistent with the overall theme of the meeting. The first one is on financial inclusion. Think if we think about the fact that over 2 billion people, 38% of adults, do not have access to a bank account. Micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises are often the largest employers in most low-income countries, but lack access to savings, insurance, and credit. But collectively, they conduct business with $19 trillion in cash and over $15 trillion in electronic payments annually. So our project efforts started in 2012 promoting global financial inclusion, bring together the public and the private sectors, and have collectively already taken action in four countries, Indonesia, India, Mexico, and Colombia, and the projects that have concentrated on extending payment and credit services to small retailers, expanding merchant acceptance of digital payments, improving interoperability and incentives to increase digital payment usage among retailers. And going forward, we'll continue to work on our efforts in Latin America and expand those efforts into Africa. So very, very important as we think about inclusiveness. Another important area as we think about health is a coalition for epidemic preparedness and innovation that we announced earlier in the fall, building on significantly during the meeting. It's called CEPI for short. The most recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa, as you well know, killed over 11,000 people and caused an estimated economic loss of over $2 billion in the worst-hit countries in 2015 alone. The outbreak exposed the need for a global mechanism to coordinate research and development on all kinds of health technology, vaccines, diagnostics, and medicines against epidemic threats, highlighted that we need a new system with an innovative governance architecture. And so CEPI is an innovative partnership between the public, private, philanthropic, and civil organizations. It was founded by the governments of India and Norway, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, WELCOME, and the World Economic Forum. It's also been backed by the World Health Organization and Medicine San Frontier, as well as the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry and leading academic researchers and NGOs. CEPI will bring together all of these constituents to ensure that vaccines get developed and get to the place they need to be. And industry is key in this because there's no one industry, manufacturer, or government that's going to be able to do this alone. It fills a critical gap in the public, private necessity to solve the world's problems. Let me close with one final illustration, as we look at the fourth industrial revolution, technologies and cities, the question of autonomous vehicles. The forum has offered the resources of our working group on autonomous vehicles, a group of 30 executives from the automotive, logistics, technology, energy, and insurance industries, as well as executives from the cities of Gothenburg and Singapore to leading cities in autonomous mobility, to collaborate with Boston Mayor Marty Walsh and his executive team to share the learning from on-the-ground pilots and public private cooperation with other cities from around the world. Cities who are keen to embrace the fourth industrial revolution in a way that beneficially impacts its citizenry. Some key deliverables to date include capturing the Boston perspective over 130 hours of focused workshops with members of the city about their views on transportation and autonomous vehicles, really getting the voice of the people. Coming up with an autonomous vehicle strategy with both business models and operating models talking about how you could roll out autonomous vehicles. Starting to understand the societal impact of autonomous vehicles, putting together agent-based models that do traffic simulation that help understand the effects on congestion, number of cars, pollution in cities. And actually doing last just last week the first on-street pilot with new autonomy. And so more to come as this effort continues to roll out and share across the globe. And so just a few teasers from the business community aspect. Many, many more will be brought forward, discussed, and elevated at Davos, and we look forward to sharing those as we go forward. Thank you. Cheryl, thanks very much. I'm going to turn now to my colleague, Philippa Ursula, just to understand how our political and governmental participation relates to the program agenda and work streams that we'll be dealing with in Davos. Philipp. Thank you, Aiden. Ladies and gentlemen, given the urgent need for a global multi-stakeholder platform for public-private collaboration, we are delighted to match the record number by business delegation with the record number of public sector participation. We have again more than 300 public figures, means ministers, regulators, administrators, as well as mayors. And we have them out of 70 different countries, high-level delegation, which truly underscores that we are a global institution. In addition to the public sector, we have certainly all the major international organizations. More than 40 heads of the international organization will participate. And what Professor Schwab just mentioned, certainly the new Secretary General of the UN. And as well, in addition to all the international organizations, we will have a strong, enriching, non-governmental organization participation. More than 71 representatives of our NGOs and the civil society will enrich the program and the activities during our annual meeting in Davos. And certainly the number is a record number depressive, but even more impressive is their engagement and their commitment to our mission. Since the last annual meeting in 2016, we had more than 200 different sessions, events, project activities, content, touch points in order to prepare this annual meeting. And I would bet that we will have the similar commitment, agreements and activities over the course of the next 12 months. And that means we can bring people together in a multi-stakeholder spirit from across the world, but we can really have some action on the ground. And so allow me to mention finally one example that we can really move the needle in very important issues. Professor Schwab just mentioned the humanitarian challenges the world is facing. And as you know, since many years, the forum is quite active in this area. Around our humanitarian imperative, we have more than 30 sessions in the four days of our annual meeting in Davos. And last year, one example, we've had a major session with Queen Rania, the president of ICIC and others, and there was a commitment that they will create in Jordan free trade zones in order to give refugees an opportunity, a job and education. And there was a question if the EU will accept once the products out of these free trade zones and finally they could sign an agreement between the Kingdom of Jordan and the European Union. And that's a very concrete example that we can work together, bring together the multi-stakeholders on us as a platform in order to work on the benefit for the people in the region, in the Levante, but globally as well. And you can find in the documents a lot more of all these regional projects. We are almost everywhere engaged with all the different public figures, the international organization and the NGOs. So we have them on the list and finally I would like to mention that it's certainly to update because it's very dynamic. We get always confirmations. So we're really happy that we have really such a record number of public participation in Davos. Philip, thank you very much. Last year I'm going to call on my colleague Ben Amur to talk us through the program. She's our head of program design. So she's been responsible for helping put together these 400 plus sessions. Thank you. Thanks, Adrian. So as you've heard, we really see the annual meeting as a platform for interaction and I often refer to it as a means to an end and not an end in itself. And we've gone about designing the program by really thinking about a huge different range of types of sessions that can facilitate both interaction but also collaboration and dialogue and debate. And our aim as an organization here is really to look at the meeting experience as a whole as a way to help really change the way people think, the way they feel and ultimately the way they act. This year's program will have over 400 sessions taking place over the course of the five days and half of these sessions will be live streamed and invite the general public to join the conversations too via social media. So we've heard a little bit about some of the key focus areas where we believe there's a real need for responsive and responsible leadership. And so in the main program, I just wanted to highlight a few more. Around reforming market capitalism and responsible business, we're going to be asking our industry leaders to really reflect on what will it take to strengthen the compact between business and society. We're also looking at sort of bringing fresh energy and revitalizing the global economy and shifting away from what has become a very heavy resource heavy and low inflation growth models to ones that are much more inclusive and more sustainable for the long term. We're also looking at ways in which our response to global issues and the collaborative effort around global issues can be more effective. We've heard a lot about the system initiatives that the forum leads year round. Many of these will be flowing through the annual meeting. But I'll just mention a few on climate change, for example, we'll be asking the international community, what will it take to really accelerate progress post Paris agreements? And the humanitarian crisis also will feature prominently in the program this year. Among sort of a number of high level sessions, we'll also be running a series of much more informal dialogues where we've worked together with leading practitioners from business and non business to really look at more creative and innovative ways to address the humanitarian challenges and this informality and the dialogues that we're creating there will actually allow us to go much further in terms of looking at ways in which we can replicate these and scale. Now being a responsive leader today as we've heard already from Professor Schwab is very much the leader's responsibility to listen to the people and listen not just to experiences but also some of the fears. And this is where we've made a conscious effort this year to introduce more diverse voices into the program, whether from a gender perspective but also generational and geographic. We have over 90% of our interactive panel sessions this year include women. And another example I want to highlight from a generation and geographic perspective is our shaping Davos series. This is a series of sessions that will connect live to Shaperhubs around the world. This is our community of over 7,000 young people under the age of 30 doing incredible work in their local communities to improve the lives locally and we'll be connecting live not just to bring a fresh perspective into the conversation but actually to help push the conversations at the highest level in Davos much more towards impact. I'll just mention an example of this. We have a session on bridging the urban rural divide and in this session in particular we'll be connecting live to Abuja and learning from the Shapers there as to how they're preventing radicalization, for example, and Beirut on approaches there for integrating refugees. So we've mentioned Davos very much as a platform for interaction and the program itself has been co-designed as you've heard already with many of our communities made up of business, government, media, civil society and as part of this group we have over 150 thought leaders from the world of academia and the arts as part of this process. Again to bring new thinking but also new research into the conversations. In this context I just want to mention a couple of examples of what we're doing here. We have 10 Nobel laureates joining us in Davos in science, economics and peace. We've also created a series of ideas labs with some of the world's leading universities like Stanford, MIT, European Research Council, ETH Zurich as well among others to create a series of sessions looking at responsive and responsible leadership around the fourth industrial revolution and really helping to bring the latest research and developments from the labs into the conversations in Davos and helping us look at some of the disruptions not just to industries but also economies and society at large. We've also partnered with the Smithsonian with the Science Gallery with Welcome Trust and also the Dubai Future Foundation as well as a number of artists and technology pioneers to create a very new unique interactive exhibition in Davos which is designed to really touch not just the minds of participants but also the hearts of participants and reflect a little bit on the evolving relationship between humans and technology. From the world of the arts I'll just mention a few here in terms of highlights. We have 40 cultural leaders joining us in Davos and we engage cultural leaders because these are very much the voices and the people who have there is on the ground and are very much those that can speak truth to power. We'll kick off our annual meeting 2017 with the 23rd annual crystal awards this year and these are awards that honor and recognize artists from around the world who are doing fantastic work for society. This year our awardees are Anne-Sophie Mutter the violinist for her work in helping to promote musical education among youth. We'll also be awarding singer songwriter Shakira for her work on helping to advance early childhood education and artist and producer Forrest Whittaker for his work around conflict resolution and peace building. And finally I just want to mention one more highlight at the annual meeting and this is very much where the annual meeting provides a platform for a special performance by the Afghan women's orchestra Zora. This will be a performance that actually closes the annual meeting 2017 but a performance that then launches a tour around Switzerland and Germany which is very much geared towards promoting intercultural dialogue and the orchestra itself comprises 30 young women between the ages of 14 to 20 who for the first time in 30 years in their country are playing and performing music. So these are just a few of the highlights of the annual meeting 2017 that I wanted to share with you. Thank you very much. Emma thank you. Aware that we have a short period left for some questions so can I just get a sense in the room of who is keen to ask a question? We have microphones I think on both sides of the room so if we can start on that side those two gentlemen and maybe take three or four just so we can make sure everyone gets an opportunity to speak. Gentlemen I'm from people's that sounded good. I'm from people's daily Chinese media. I want to ask a question for Professor Schwab. You just mentioned the Chinese President Xi Jinping will attend the forum this year so what message do you expect from him to deliver at the World Economic Forum? Thank you. Thank you very much. Gentlemen next door. I'm Zhang Huo from China Central Television. I know the Chinese President's attendance is one of the highlights of this year's World Economic Forum and I would like to know what kind of sessions will be organized relating to China and whether the attendance of the Chinese President is in line with this year's theme the responsible and the responsive leadership. Thank you. China and just on on that side. Hello we're Tina Torsoli from Bloomberg apart from to follow up on the questions that our Chinese colleague asked so you said the presence of the Chinese President is relevant in many ways in what way specifically can you elaborate on this first ever visit at Davos but secondly obviously the other big theme is populism and none of the big political figures populist figures that are shaping the world countries like the UK France the Netherlands you know will be present so did you invite them and did they not come or did you not invite them can we have a bit of color on that because obviously it's one of our big themes this year and Tom. Tom Miles from Reuters could you tell us has anybody pulled out at the last minute to attend the Trump inauguration or to have an early meeting with Donald Trump there's a report that Benjamin Netanyahu might have done that Benjamin Netanyahu might have done that and also given that the Trump inauguration is sort of you know comes right at the end of Davos in a way I mean I wonder what can be done what can be agreed at this meeting it's a sort of you know last hurrah of globalization before Trump arrives and we all know how unpredictable he is I mean nobody can lay anything down if it needs the agreement of Trump because it seems nobody knows what to expect from him so what you know given that difficulty how can you overcome it thanks. Well Tom I hope the annual meeting will answer your confusion just on before handing over to my colleagues just on the point about invitations to populist leaders there's an extraordinary range of political figures invited to Davos they tend to be people who are in office some populist politicians from governments where populism has come to power are indeed in Davos because they've won elections and they're represented and obviously that's that's what gets their participation so I think you'll see there are a number of of governments that would be recognized as populist who'll be there in Davos and perhaps it's worth scanning through the full list and and figuring out who those folks might be but if I can turn perhaps to Professor Schwab just to talk about Professor President Xi and his participation particularly the message and the relationship of the president to the theme. Thank you thank you for the questions and let me respond to several of the questions first I think the participation of President Xi is particularly relevant in a connection of the theme responsive and responsible leadership. China since I have visited the country first in 79 we have developed a very close relationship with a strong presence in China. China we are all aware that we are now in the transition in the world to a multi-polar geopolitical and geo-economic structure. China will equal the United States soon as far as economic power is concerned so I foresee that President Xi will show how China will assume in global affairs a responsive and responsible leadership role. Of course it's not only to the second question it's not only the message of the president we as I was mentioned before we have a strong delegation accompanying the president but I think four ministers two members of the Politburo but also a very strong Chinese business delegation. We in the spirit of Davos we want to engage them as much as possible in the different session because we feel as it has been mentioned here Davos is a working conference with a lot of efforts collaborative efforts going on China is playing an important role and we want not only in Davos but also in the future engage Chinese political and business leaders as much as possible in all of our initiatives. As far just remark related and to populists we our general philosophy is and as you have seen with presentations today we are living in a very complex world which is all the issues are interrelated we do not always know what the unintended consequences of our decisions are so there are no simple answers to the challenges which we have so what we have to do in Davos is to show and in our organization is to show how complex the situation is and how we need a systemic holistic approach such uniqueness of Davos. Of course there are some politicians which may have first agreed to join but if you are aware of the inner political situation it's very understandable that they had to cancel participation and if you look at the participants list it's so rich and by the way the forum is not built on let's say as it is sometimes assumed on some celebrities well-known people taking the floor the forum is built on work engagement collaboration and here I think when you look at the list we we are very very pleased it's a unique it's the biggest participation as my colleague has said. As far as the American inauguration is concerned or the inauguration of President Trump as you may have heard I myself have met Mr. Trump and some of his collaborators we have someone from the transition team representing the new administration of course as you know most of the people who have been nominated and by the way we know many of the new cabinet members have been engaged into forum activities in the past but as you know as they require the confirmation of the Senate before they can express themselves publicly. And Thomas you'll be aware the US State Department traditionally discourages the attendance of foreign leaders at the US inauguration might be something just to double check with your colleagues in the Washington Bureau. Any other questions I'm aware that we are about to hear our 3 p.m. cut-off point so if anyone has a question before I say thank you to my colleagues. Jean can I, General Minister? My question is to Professor Schwab I'm from Chinatown. We know that Europe is not safe enough right now because terrorism is quite rampant right now so how are you as a former well-insured safe you know dialogues and meetings in diverse can you tell us some measures your forum and the Swiss government have implemented to ensure a safe forum. Thank you. Thanks Jean and perhaps I'll just answer on behalf of Professor Schwab just to say that we are continually in close and active discussion with our colleagues in Switzerland who take charge of the security of the annual meeting and we have full confidence in their endeavors on our behalf and we look forward to a successful and a very fascinating annual meeting next week. So with that I'm going to draw this to a close and thank everyone for being here on a snowy Geneva day and if anyone wants to follow up with colleagues they're here. Professor Schwab has a tight schedule so he's onto his next appointment but thanks all for joining. Thank you very much.