Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation, 2 June 2014
Opening Address
Chairman
Ladies and Gentlemen
Colleagues and friends
Welcome to this Workshop on Education about Standardisation. Let me start by offering my sincere gratitude to Professor Oleg Zolotokrylin, Vice-Rector, Bonch-Bruevich Saint Petersburg State University of Telecommunication; James Irvine, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Standards Education Committee; and Mitsuji Matsumoto, Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers of Japan (IEICE), Japan. Your support in organising this event and ITU’s endeavour to increase academic participation in its work is much appreciated.
Kaleidoscope 2014 will start tomorrow and we hope that you all will join us at this, the 6th event in the series. Kaleidoscope events have proven a valuable contribution to the ITU’s standards making and helped to raise awareness in academic circles of the value of standardization and of ITU.
Since my election and building on the legacy of my predecessor I have put much effort into increasing the participation of academia in the work of ITU-T. The Kaleidoscope events were one of my first initiatives and they remain a very important platform in spreading word to new parts of the world about ITU-T’s services to its academic membership.
Since the new academia membership category was introduced in 2011 we have seen 45 institutions join the Standardization Sector out of a total of 63 across the three sectors of ITU.
In parallel to gaining greater participation, another challenge is to produce standards-minded graduates, business leaders and policy makers. With that in mind and with the aim of advancing standards education worldwide, the TSB Director’s Ad hoc Group on Education about Standardization was established in 2012.
The first meeting was held at the Aalborg University in Denmark, 8-9 October 2013 also in conjunction with a Standards Education Workshop. The second meeting was hosted at the Kyoto University, in Kyoto, Japan, 25 April 2013. The meeting was again organized in conjunction with a Workshop on Education about Standardization, and in addition the ITeidoscope Conference of 2013.
Together with partners such as the IEEE, EURAS, and IEICE, and participants representing the government, business, standardization and research communities, this event was successful in collecting ideas to assist in the creation of guidelines for a syllabus on education about standardization.
To instill the importance of standardization in business and government circles is critical to ensuring that standards are implemented effectively but reaching the students of today is perhaps even more important.
These young intellects are the experts of tomorrow who will drive the development of technologies and hence also the standardization process enabling more wide-spread adoption and interoperability.
So, "education about standardization" is related not to specific technologies, but rather to raise awareness of the importance of standards to business executives, government officials and students at undergraduate and graduate levels, to increase their understanding of the processes, activities, strategy and rules, and to increase the attention devoted to standardization by curricula across all academic disciplines.
Other initiatives that ITU is working on in the field of academia include the ITU/ISO/IEC World Standard Cooperation (WSC) Academic Week event that was first held in 2010. WSC Academic Day events have been held annually since to promote dialogue between universities and the international standards community and to raise awareness and foster cooperation and joint initiatives.
This year’s WSC Academic Day will be held in conjunction with the International Cooperation on Education about Standardization (ICES) workshop in Ottawa, Canada, 15 August 2014, with the theme: The “next generation” in standardization.
Last year, ISO, IEC and ITU held a WSC Roundtable on "The role of standardization in strategy, innovation and entrepreneurship" in partnership with ANSI and the Library of Congress in Washington DC. The event was attended by university professors, CEOs and senior managers from sndards bodies, and senior representatives from industry and government.
The next WSC Roundtable will be held early October 2014 on the USA West coast.
This afternoon we will hear about initiatives from organizations supporting education about standardization such as the IEICE, Japan; IEEE; CEN/CENELEC; and UNECE; as well as from academia such as the Institute of International Business and Law, Russian Federation, and ITU academia members: SPbSUT, Russian Federation; Waseda University, Japan; and Aalborg University.
And following this event is the third meeting of the TSB Director’s Ad hoc Group on Education about Standardization (AHG-SE) to continue these discussions.
I hope you will all find the workshop interesting and will participate in the discussion that follows it.I hope you all will profit from this event and contribute to stimulate the discussion.
