This fourth year edition focused on ‘International Standards to enable the Digital Transformation and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs’). The ambition of the conference was to lay the foundation for how stakeholders could work in collaboration to develop international standards, guidelines and frameworks for driving digital transformation for SDGs.

Hosted by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the symposium was chaired by H.E. Nele Leosk, Ambassador-at-Large for Digital Affairs from Estonia.

Session 3 of the event - Towards people-oriented cities and communities: Driving cross-sectoral digital innovation and transformation - focused on Cities and Communities, so it was of particular interest to the Living-in.EU community.  The session highlighted how significant digital transformation required urban stakeholders to prioritize the needs and concerns of citizens over the implementation of technologies. Cities and Communities are particularly vulnerable to the disruptive nature of technologies and are burdened by global challenges including sustainability and climate change. This session explored how digital innovations can be leveraged to meet the demands of citizens and build resiliency in key sectors within smart cities and communities.

The session was moderated by Javier Garcia Diaz, Director General, Spanish Association for Standardization (UNE). The pannelis were Cristina Martinez, Deputy Head of the Technologies for Smart Communities Unit, European Commission, Bettina Tratz-Ryan, Vice President Research, Gartner, Ramy Ahmed Fathy, Co-Chairman, Focus Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) for Digital Agriculture (FG-AI4A), Alexandre Bosshard, Coordinator and Project Manager, Pully, Switzerland and Hee-Dae Kim, Director General in Digital Transformation Agency, Daegu Technopark.

The symposium’s conclusions were submitted to ITU’s World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (WTSA) – the governing conference for ITU’s standardization arm (ITU-T), currently underway in Geneva, Switzerland, and online.

You can read the conclusions here.

You can find more about the event here.