AI for Good Summit - Future of Smart and Safe Mobility

AI for Good Summit: Future of Smart and Safe Mobility - State of the art

31 May 2019 - Geneva, Switzerland

Good morning,

Welcome to the last day of this year’s AI for Good Global Summit and this session on Smart and Safe Mobility in particular. The event this week has focused on how AI can help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. The SDGs are very ambitious: ending poverty and hunger; providing quality education for all; bringing clean water and sanitation to everyone; all by 2030. Some of the targets related to the goals are even more ambitious, for example Target 3.6: halving the number of deaths and injuries on roads by 2020.

These challenges are of a scale that demand bold, decisive action, and the actions being taken by the automotive industry certainly fit that description.

The industry is undergoing extraordinary transformation with the future of transport clearly electric; highly automated; and – increasingly – shared.

Future smart and safe mobility will impact billions of people’s lives for the better.

Not only will it reduce deaths and injuries on roads, it will improve environmental sustainability, and create the many opportunities that expanded access to mobility will bring.

New technologies are at the heart of this transformation, and technical standardization will be essential to ensure that they are deployed efficiently and at scale.

This is why carmakers such as Volkswagen Group and Hyundai have joined ITU as well as a diverse range of other automotive industry players such as China’s Telematics Industry Application Alliance, Continental, Bosch, BlackBerry, Tata Communications and Mitsubishi Electric are ITU members.

By joining the ITU, the United Nations specialized agency for information and communication technologies (ICTs), they are helping develop the international standards that will protect and encourage key investments, improve road safety and help build the future intelligent transport systems.

ITU’s international standards ensure interoperability, security and accessibility and reduce costs and prices through economies of scale.

Our open, inclusive standardization processes build the mutual trust necessary for large-scale investment, and additionally cover multimedia, quality of service, and the use of the radio spectrum.

Amongst other important decisions, ITU’s World Radiocommunication Conference later this year in Egypt will allocate the new spectrum for 5G above 24GHz that will be essential to provide the capacity, reliability and low latency for widescale implementation of these technologies.

But we cannot work alone. The Sustainable Development Agenda emphasizes the importance of partnerships and this is something that ITU is continually striving for with many different players.

In particular we have worked in partnership with the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, UNECE, the body responsible for global transport regulation, for more than 10 years. 

Through this partnership ITU is developing the technical standards to support UNECE’s vehicle regulations.

And we encourage more extensive collaboration, at the national, regional and international level both by the public and private sectors.

The automotive and ICT industries and their respective regulators, and the many new market segments emerging at the intersection of vehicles and ICT, must work together.   

By innovating in partnership we will build public trust in smart mobility systems – public trust that will be critical for their success.

I hope this session this morning will contribute to this in some small way.

So on behalf of ITU I thank the moderator and all the speakers for their contribution to this session and wish you all a very interesting and productive discussion.

Thank you.​