ITU-T e-FLASH
Telecommunication Standardization Sector
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ITU and WHO to host a Workshop on e-Health Standards and Interoperability
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Organizations developing e-health standards, and a variety of other
stakeholders, have been invited to an ITU/WHO workshop to define the
current state of the e-health industry, discuss barriers to e-health
technology adoption and to establish an ITU/WHO roadmap signposting
the industry’s future course. The workshop will take place at ITU
Headquarters in Geneva, 26-27 April 2012, and is open to ITU members
and WHO Member States.
Ageing societies and the world’s growing population are
exerting progressively greater pressures on healthcare
infrastructures. Providing equitable, affordable healthcare services
to the world’s citizens is a challenge overwhelming traditional
healthcare systems. e-Health is thus soon expected to form part of
mainstream healthcare systems, but also to become the centerpiece of
many national administrations’ healthcare offerings in years to
come.
To encourage widespread deployment of e-health applications,
particularly in developing countries, it is essential to achieve
interoperability among systems and to reduce the cost of devices
through economies of scale. Open, global, interoperable standards
are the tools to achieve this, and will also be key to ensuring an
open, competitive market for e-health innovation in the future.
Much work has been conducted on the development of e-health
standards and frameworks for interoperability, but these efforts
have not been followed by proportional standard implementation or
e-health service deployment. April’s workshop will address this
disparity by clearly identifying the necessary future
standardisation work, in particular to ensure interoperability, as
well as the roles to be played by different stakeholders in
progressing this work. In addition, meeting participants will
discuss the creation of an e-health policy and strategic framework
to guide the development of a sustainable e-health industry.
For more information on the workshop’s content, venue or
participants, please consult the
workshop's webpage. |
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Community bicycle application wins ITU-Telefonica Green ICT Hackathon
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Asier Arranz from Spain has been awarded $3000 and a Nokia Lumia
mobile phone as first prize in the Green ICT Hackathon, an event
organized by ITU and Telefónica and run in parallel to last week’s
Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Arranz’ proposed ‘Bicing Gamification’ application aims to
encourage users of Bicing, the community bicycle program in
Barcelona, to deposit bicycles at underserved Bicing stations.
Currently, bicycle-moving vans are necessary to maintain an optimal
distribution of bicycles around the city. The application therefore
makes use of a geo-location system to notify Bicing users of the
stations in need of more bicycles. To encourage users to deposit
their bicycles at these underserved stations, Arranz suggests
micropayments be made those who do, possibly in the form of
deductions to their annual Bicing subscription fees.
“The aim of the ‘Bicing Gamification’ application,” says
Arranz, “is to reduce costs and CO2 emissions and ‘gamify’ (turn
into a game) this green transport system to encourage its use and
make cities more sustainable.”
Second prize, $2000 and Nokia Lumia, was awarded to
Dirceu
Dirs from Brazil for an application targeting drivers of electric
vehicles and petroleum-fueled cars alike. The “Easy Refuel”
application was developed on the Arduino electronics platform and
points drivers towards the nearest, cheapest fuel stations when
their vehicles require refueling or recharging.
Third prize, a Nokia Lumia, went to
Aaron Franco from the USA
for his “Jatrobot” application which aims to harness social
interaction to encourage a widespread production of biodiesel. The
name stems from the “Jatropha Curcas” tree, the seeds of which can
be pressed to yield an oil used to produce biodiesel. The Jatrobot
app allows users to signal their approval of an
environmentally-friendly product by way of a ‘like’ button, an
action which triggers the planting of Jatropha tree seeds by a
web-connected robot.
The aim of the Green ICT Hackathon was to encourage the
development of applications promoting “Sustainable Energy for All”.
Of further importance to ITU and Telefónica is the Hackathon’s
contribution to the creation of a global network of ‘green’ ICT
developers, one promoting the use of ICT to improve energy
efficiency and technology transfer; two key goals to be addressed at
Rio+20.
ITU and Telefónica thank their partners in this initiative;
Nokia, SAP and the Joint Research Center of the European Commission
and WMO. ITU also wishes to thank Telefónica and, specifically,
Telefónica’s Office of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency and
BlueVia Movistar Spain (Telefónica Digital).In addition to the
Hackathon, ITU and Telefonica are organizing the 2nd Green ICT
Application Challenge to find the best and most innovative Concept
Paper for an ICT application to help promote “Sustainable Energy for
All”.
Send us your Concept Paper by 13 April 2012. More information
about the Hackathon and Challenge can be found at:
http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/climatechange/greenict/201206/index.html or
by contacting us at greenstandard@itu.int. |
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Cloud Computing and standardization: Technical Reports published
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ITU-T’s Focus Group on Cloud Computing has completed its preliminary
study into cloud computing’s standardization ecosystem and has
released its
FG Cloud Technical Report (Parts 1 to 7). The reports
signal the conclusion of the Focus Group’s study period and its
findings come to form input for the cloud computing work taking
place across the ITU-T under the leadership of Study Group 13
(Future Networks), overseen by the
Joint Coordination Activity on
Cloud Computing.
Clear industry demand for the technology and the promise of
new revenues to ICT players has led to great market optimism, with
one forecast predicting that global cloud IP traffic will account
for more than one-third of total data center traffic by 2015. Cisco
Global Cloud Index:
Forecast and Methodology, 2010–2015.
International standards will be key to ensuring a competitive
market for cloud service provision, one where services are
affordable and the clouds offered by different vendors interoperate.
FG Cloud’s Technical Reports provide a detailed overview of cloud
computing standardization and benefits from telecommunication and
ICT perspectives. Two new cloud services categories are identified,
communication and network as a service (CaaS and NaaS). In addition,
cloud ecosystems and a first ICT cloud reference architecture are
defined. These outputs will form a strong reference base for the
ITU-T Study Groups engaged with cloud standards development.
Technical Reports - seven separate but complementary reports:
- Introduction to the cloud ecosystem: definitions, taxonomies,
use cases and high-level requirements
- Functional requirements and reference architecture
- Requirements and framework architecture of cloud
infrastructure
- Cloud resource management gap analysis
- Cloud security
- Overview of SDOs involved in cloud computing
- Cloud computing benefits from telecommunication and ICT
perspectives.
The interest sparked by ITU’s cloud computing work has
resulted in several new memberships. For more on our cloud
activities, please see the ITU
Joint Coordination Activity on Cloud
Computing, ITU-T Study Group 13 and other Study Groups: SG 17,
SG 2,
SG 5. |
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ITU joins SDOs from China, Japan and Korea to enhance cooperation
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Following the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between ITU
and the four standardisation bodies of China, Japan and Korea (CJK)
last year, see press release
here, Malcolm Johnson, Director of the
ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Bureau, led a delegation
from the ITU Secretariat to the eleventh CJK Meeting (CJK-11) 14-16
March at the Seagaia Convention Centre in Miyazaki Prefecture,
Japan. The Indian standards body GISFI also attended the meeting as
an observer as it has requested to join the MoU.
The meeting addressed global ICT standardization questions of
common interest to the region’s key standards bodies:
ARIB,
CCSA,
TTA and
TTC.
In his opening speech Johnson noted that CJK governments
together account for 15 per cent of the total financial
contributions received by ITU from Member States, and private
entities from these nations account for 20 per cent of the
contributions ITU-T receives from the private sector. Moreover, CJK
makes a significant number contribution to ITU meetings: 38 percent
more contributions in 2011 than in 2009.
Full speech can be seen
here.
CJK meetings seek to maintain and improve the commitment to
mutual understanding and cooperation, and recognise the imperative
of coordinated international standards for the sound progression of
each of the countries’ ICT industries. The meeting identified the
following topics as candidates for collaboration under the MoU: M2M
and Dynamic Spectrum Access; Future IMT; smart grid; cloud computing
and security; and the work on environment and climate change.
The Deputy Director of ITU’s Radiocommunication Bureau, Fabio
Leite, also participated in the meeting stressing the importance of
collaboration with ITU’s Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R), in
particular on M2M access networks where there is a clear need for
interoperability between radio-based systems. |
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Tutorial on ITU methodologies for assessing the environmental impact of ICTs
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ITU will hold an
Information and Training Session on ITU
Methodologies for Assessing the Environmental Impact of ICT at ITU
headquarters, Geneva, 12 April.
The event will provide a tutorial on the content and
application of ITU-T's new L.1400 series of Recommendations which
detail standardized methodologies to assess the life-cycle
environmental impact of ICTs, both in terms of their own emissions
and the emissions-savings created through ICT applications in other
industry sectors.
ICTs can play a key role in improving the environmental
sustainability of all industry sectors, particularly in those most
harmful to the environment; such as energy generation,
transportation, building construction and waste disposal.
The new standard methodologies will generate figures upon
which businesses can model future revenues, costs and efficiency
gains provided by green ICTs; and figures enabling governments and
regulators to identify the gains in social and economic welfare that
green ICTs can achieve.
The workshop, for which remote participation is available,
will cover the first three* Recommendations of the L.1400 series:
*final two parts of the L.1400 series, ICT in Cities and ICT
in Countries or Groups of Countries, are under development by
experts working on Question 18 in ITU-T Study Group 5 |
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Take part in the World Standards Day 2012 poster competition!
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A competition open to all has been launched to design a poster for
World Standards Day, 14 October, on the theme, “Less waste, better
results – Standards increase efficiency”.
The competition is being held by the World Standards
Cooperation (WSC), which comprises the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), the International Organization
for Standardization (ISO) and the International Telecommunication
Union (ITU).
The designer(s) of the best poster will win 1 500 Swiss
francs, with the three runners-up receiving 500 Swiss francs each.
To compete, designers should send their entries in .jpg or .png
format to the following e-mail address:
wsdposter@worldstandardscooperation.org. Submissions will be
accepted until 30 April.
IEC, ISO and ITU representatives will choose the finalists.
The shortlisted entries will be published on the
WSC Website. The
general public will choose the winning designs.
People can follow the World Standards Day poster competition
on Twitter and
Facebook.
To help prospective World Standards Day poster artists, the
WSC Website includes a number of resources:
Any questions about the competition should be sent to:
wsdposter@worldstandardscooperation.org, Twitter or
Facebook.
The World Standards Cooperation was set up in 2001 in order
to strengthen and advance the voluntary consensus-based
international standards systems of IEC, ISO and ITU. Each year on 14
October, the members of the IEC, ISO and ITU celebrate World
Standards Day, which is a means of paying tribute to the
collaborative efforts of the thousands of experts worldwide who
develop the voluntary technical agreements that are published as
international standards. |
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First meeting of Focus Group to create a common M2M service layer
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ITU’s new Focus Group on the Machine-to-Machine service layer (FG
M2M) will meet for the first time at ITU Headquarters in Geneva,
17-18 April 2012. M2M service layer standards will act as important
catalysts for the market’s growth, and an earlier
newslog
announcement of FG M2M’s formation has attracted the interest of an
array of M2M-focused organizations, both within and outside ITU’s
membership. See FG M2M’s homepage
here.
The M2M market is expected to grow rapidly over the coming
years and, as part of the more broadly-defined Internet of Things
(see
ITU’s JCA-IoT), will encompass a wide variety of industry
sectors. Some forecasts predict that 50 billion devices will be
connected to the Internet by 2020.
Considering the wide range of M2M’s possible applications –
enabling services across vertical markets including healthcare,
logistics, transport, utilities and countless others – this
prediction may hold true; but certainly not without the
interoperability enabled by global ICT standards. A common M2M
service layer, agreed at the international level by stakeholders in
the M2M and relevant vertical markets, will provide a cost-efficient
platform able to be easily deployed in hardware and software, in a
multi-vendor environment, across industry sectors.
FG M2M will identify a minimum set of requirements common to
vertical markets, and thereby create the knowledge-base needed to
begin the development of open, international ITU standards. In
analyzing the requirements of vertical markets, the group will
initially focus on the healthcare market by investigating
application programming interfaces (APIs) and protocols supporting
e-health applications and services.
The deadline for submission of input documents is 10 April,
and the meeting is open to all interested parties from ITU Member
States. Registration for both on-site and remote participation is
available at http://www.itu.int/reg/tsg/3000361. |
INFORMATION LINKS |
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