Good morning and welcome to this joint workshop on education about standardization.

 

I would like to thank Professor Tetsuya Miki, representing the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE), Japan; and Prof. Prasad, representing both Aalborg University’s Center for TeleInFrastruktur (CTIF), and the Global ICT Standardization Forum for India (GISFI) for your support in putting on this event and in ITU’s endeavour to increase academic participation in its work.

 

Most of you will have been present at the Kaleidoscope event held here this week on the theme Building Sustainable Communities.The Kaleidoscope events began in 2008 and were one of the first initiatives to attract academia to ITU, and they remain a very important platform in increasing ITU’s academic membership. Indeed I am pleased that Kyoto University became our newest member this week.

 

Since the new academia membership category was introduced in 2011 we have welcomed 55 universities join ITU, 38 in the Standardization Sector.

 

Academic participants are telling us that they have a strong incentive to contribute to the ITU-T process because it is an important way of having their academic work recognised internationally. Further kudos comes when the standards containing their contributions are implemented. They are also reporting that there is enormous value to be had from the networking opportunities at our Study Group meetings and the chance to gain an understanding of what the requirements of industry are.

 

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 last year.

 

We had the first meeting in Aalborg University last October with the objective to strengthen close collaboration among ITU-T experts in standardization, representatives of academia, as well as other standards development organizations.

 

We need to emphasis the importance of standardization in business and government circles to ensure that standards are implemented effectively, and so reaching the students of today is very important. These young intellects are the experts of tomorrow who will drive the development of technologies, and hence the standardization process enabling these technologies’ to have wide-spread adoption and interoperability.

 

In this context, "education about standardization" is related not to specific technologies, but rather to the process that can inform business executives, government officials, and students at undergraduate and graduate levels, on all aspects related to international standards, standardization processes, and standards development.

 

I hope that the participation of representatives of government, business, standardization, research and academia will help identify the elements to assist in the creation of a framework for a Syllabus on Education about Standardization.

 

We will hear about initiatives from Japan, Korea, Macedonia, and India. We will also hear from organizations supporting education on standardization including ICES (International Cooperation on Education about Standards), IEEE, EURAS, and the Korean Standards Association.

 

Let me just mention a few other initiatives that ITU is working on in the field of academia.

 

ITU works very closely with many other standards organizations, in particular the World Standard Cooperation (WSC) between ITU, ISO and IEC. Under the auspices of WSC, the first Academic Week event was held in 2010. WSC Academic Day events are now held annually to promote dialogue between universities and the international standards community and to raise awareness and foster cooperation and joint initiatives.

 

For the third year running, this year’s WSC Academic Day will be held in conjunction with the ICES workshop.

 

The theme this year is: Education in standardization for future managers. It will be held at ETSI, France on 12-14 June.

 

On 26-27 June 2013, WSC, in partnership with ANSI and the Library of Congress, Washington DC, USA will host an event titled “The role of standardization in strategy, innovation and entrepreneurship; Promoting dialogue between leading academic institutions and standards organizations”.

 

And of course this event afternoon we will have the second meeting of the TSB Director’s Ad hoc Group on Education about Standardization (AHG-SE), which will build on the discussion in this workshop.

 

There are many isolated initiatives in this field, and it is clear that coordination would greatly assist in the development of consistent, high-quality curricula for education on standardization. The AHG-SE was created as an inclusive platform to facilitate these discussions.

 

I hope you will all enjoy and profit from today’s discussion.

 

Thanks you.