Agenda

Tomas Lamanauskas is Deputy Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union, elected at the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference of 2022, and taking up duties as of January 2023. His 25 years of experience spans across sectors of telecoms and digital policy, regulation and strategy, stemming from executive level positions in agencies, companies, and organizations across Europe, the Middle East, the Caribbean and the Pacific region.

As Deputy Secretary-General of ITU, Tomas focuses on the financial sustainability and operational excellence of the organization. He also works to raise the digital industry’s ambition in fighting the climate crisis through the Green Digital Action initiative and promotes investments into the digital infrastructure as well as digital resilience through the Digital Infrastructure Investment Initiative and other efforts. Additionally, Tomas contributes to the global efforts to harness the opportunities and mitigate challenges of new technologies in particular Artificial Intelligence, including through his role as a co-chair of the United Nations Inter-Agency Working Group on AI. He is also playing a key role in ensuring ITU’s support to other UN-wide development and governance efforts, including through the World Summit of the Information Society process and membership at the Operational Steering Committee of the UN Joint SDG Fund.

Tomas holds Master’s Degrees in Public Administration (Harvard), Leadership and Strategy (London Business School), Telecommunications Regulation and Policy (The University of the West Indies) and Law (Vilnius University).

Kathleen A. Kramer is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of San Diego in California. She worked to develop new engineering programs as a founding member of the faculty and eventually became the chair of electrical engineering, then serving as Director of Engineering (2004-2013), providing academic leadership for all of the university’s engineering programs. Her teaching interests are in the areas of signal processing, mechatronics and robotics, and communication systems.

She has also been a member of technical staff at several companies, including ViaSat, Hewlett Packard, and Bell Communications Research. She is a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society (AESS) and is a past vice president of the society. She is a Fellow of ABET, and a leader in the development of accreditation criteria for cyber security, mechatronics & robotics, and graduate programs. Kathleen served on the IEEE Board of Directors as IEEE Secretary and chair of Governance and IEEE Region 6 (Western USA) Director. She was also chair of the 2023 IEEE Ad Hoc Committee on Innovating Funding Models. 

She received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering magna cum laude with a second major in physics from Loyola Marymount University, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology.

Maike is a member of the IEEE Standard Association Board of Governors and the IEEE SSIT Board of Governors. She chairs the IEEE Planet Positive 2030 Initiative, the IEEE P7800TM Standards Working Group: Recommended Practice for Addressing Sustainability, Environmental Stewardship and Climate Change Challenges in Professional Practice, and the Green Hydrogen IEEE SA Industry Connections Program. She is a co-chair, IEEE Future Directions SusTech Initiative. 

Maike is a longtime advocate for sustainable development and for the deployment and use of technology that is ‘sustainable by design’ to achieve a long-term healthy planetary biosphere. Her areas of interest and expertise span diverse technical areas from ICT, energy, and water to advanced manufacturing. 

She is managing director, R&D, at a start-up company, Carbovate Development, and Adjunct Research Professor, Western University, Canada.  Maike’s career spans academia and industry in Canada, USA and Germany.  She is/has been serving on numerous Boards of Directors and Committees, including the IEEE Board of Directors and the Canadian Standards Council Steering Committee of the Artificial Intelligence and Data Governance Standardization Collaborative.