Professor Navale, Founder President of STES
Doctor Navale, Founder Secretary STES
Professor Prasad, Founding Chairman of GISFI
Mr Prakash, Secretary-General ITU-APT Foundation of India
Mr Goyal, President of CMAI
Our distinguished Chairman, Mr Maeda, Director General TTC
Ladies and gentlemen
Colleagues and Friends
It is my great pleasure to welcome you all to the 2010 Kaleidoscope Academic
Conference. I hope you will find the event both rewarding and enjoyable.
Firstly, I would like to thank the following partnering organizations without
whom this event could not have happened: The Sinhgad Technical Education
Society; the Global ICT Standardization Forum for India; the ITU-APT Foundation
of India; the CMAI Association of India; and the support of the Ministry of
Communications and Information Technology. Also our sponsors: IEEE; Cisco; NSN;
and MyFire, and of course our Chairman, Mr Youchi Maeda.
Before I say some more words on this Kaleidoscope event I would like to show you
a short video that shows how standards from ITU help connect the world.
<<VIDEO – Standards in Action>>
These standards are based on ideas. Ideas that have come from ITU members and
that have truly shaped the connected the world that we live in today…
Thomas Edison, one of the most prolific inventors in history, famously said “the
value of an idea lies in using it”.
That is why ITU-T continually strives to increase cooperation with academia, one
of the most important sources of innovation in society today. Bringing ideas to
life through standardization, can help academics raise the profile of their work
and their institution, as well as generate potential new sources of income. New
and improved technologies can make life better in so many ways. In ITU-T, we
want good ideas to become a reality and make a contribution to a safer, cleaner,
more efficient world for all.
I am very pleased to announce a new “Academia” category of membership just
introduced in ITU. This allows academics, universities and research
establishments concerned with the development of telecommunications or
information and communication technologies, to participate in the work of ITU-T.
And they will be able to do so with a fee structure affordable to academic
establishments from developed and developing countries.
We have also introduced a reduced membership fee for private-sector entities
from developing countries so they too can increase their participation and
contribution to global standards development. Perhaps just as importantly it
gives a unique opportunity to meet experts from the ICT industry, governments
and regulators around the world.
Kaleidoscope academic conferences are now in their third year and continue to
improve and expand. This event here in Pune focuses on the theme: Beyond the
Internet? - Innovations for future networks and services. And when it comes to
technical policy matters related to the future Internet, ITU has been given a
clear mandate.
Our Plenipotentiary Conference that took place in Guadalajara, Mexico, a few
weeks ago, passed a Resolution -- number 101 -- that recognizes that significant
work on IP-related issues and the future Internet is being conducted within ITU.
In fact it explicitly mentions this Kaleidoscope event as a venue to discuss
this topic.
So far, the Internet has been robust and flexible enough to sustain a continuous
evolution from a small experiment to a giant network, capable of meeting the
demands of more than one billion users. But the rise of mobile access and its
integration with optical transport networks presents new challenges. Can the
existing Internet structure evolve successfully to cope with new technologies
and booming demand, or is a “clean slate” approach required? Whatever approach
is taken, it is most important that interoperability is guaranteed, and this is
a question that will remain a priority focus of our work.
ITU greatly welcomes and encourages the contribution of academia in debates
about the Internet’s future, as well as many other issues. For this conference,
over 115 papers on interesting topics were submitted for peer review by more
than 150 experts in ICT. I appreciate very much the hard work of the review
panel in what is, no doubt, the very difficult task of selecting the most
visionary papers for presentation, from among the very high quality
contributions across the board. Their selection is the papers included in the
Kaleidoscope proceedings, which you have all received on a CD.
I am confident that discussions which start here at Pune on the social and
economic drivers that are challenging the fundamental design principles of the
Internet will continue and assist ITU-T in the development of standards for
future networks and services.
And, in addition to this conference, there are many ways in which you can stay
be involved in ITU-T and its work. For example:
- Become an member of ITU-T
- Follow our Technology Watch initiative, in which we very much encourage the
contributions of academia and research institutes.
- Attend, free of charge, our ITU-T workshops, where we advance existing work
areas and explore new ones.
- Download our ITU-T standards from the website free of charge.
I would like to draw your attention to a new feature of this year’s conference.
Jules Verne wrote about travel in the air, Space and under water, long before
any practical technologies in these areas had been invented. He was a truly
revolutionary thinker. Just the kind of person we would have attracted to
Kaleidoscope! So we have set up a special Jules Verne Corner, dedicated to those
visionaries of today who are able to imagine the world 50 years from now, and
beyond.
I am very much looking forward to hearing visionary ideas from our participants
here today.
Finally, I would like to take the opportunity to announce the theme of the
fourth Kaleidoscope conference in 2011 – the Fully Networked Human – which will
be held in South Africa in December 2011.
We are all becoming more connected and the range of issues that this topic can
cover is fascinating… Technology should be designed to benefit humans, not the
other way around!
I very much hope to see all of you again in South Africa. But now let us
stimulate new ideas on the future of the Internet, for the benefit of us all.
Thank you for your attention. |
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