Interview with the Minister of Finance and Gender Equality of Greenland | UN Celebrates International Women’s Day | UNESCO Global Summit: All Panels Are Online
Interview with the Minister of Finance and Gender Equality of Greenland | UN Celebrates International Women’s Day | UNESCO Global Summit: All Panels Are Online
International Women’s Day
Numbers matter.
How to fix the multilateral system?
Start by including women.
See the latest figures referent hiring at multilateral organisations here.
Tweet of the Week
Presented by Microsoft
The imperative for digital transformation and public-private partnerships in Least Developed Countries (LDCs).
As part of an ongoing commitment to the mission and ambition of the United Nations, Microsoft served as the co-chair of LDC5 / Private Sector Forum, where they explored ways that digital development can become a reality. Learn more here.
This week:
ITU
World Summit on the Information Society 2023
13 to 17 March, Geneva
Innovation and Access to Technology
Addressing Climate Change
Innovation and Access to Technology to Address Climate Change
What a difference 3 years make. I started the UN Brief in May 2020, during the lockdown in Switzerland. I few months before I had approached a tech newsletter in Brazil to explore contributing stories to them, to write about how emerging tech was playing out at the UN. The pandemic made me shift gears, and I started The UN Brief.
We had 300 subscribers then, now more than 12K.
Our climate change and digital divide are our most popular stories.
When I was an international news editor at UN Radio, at UN Headquarters in New York in the early 2000’s, producing their first website, and the daily news and long features, Brazil had 4.000 people with access to the Internet.
Now there are close to 200 million people with Internet access.
The first ITU World Summit on the Information Society took place in 2003. It was a huge affair with 190 plus countries participating, the telecoms eager to deploy in the developing world. Huge financial opportunities for all involved. Regulation was scoffed at. The commercial Internet was just taking off. Issues of governance were just starting to be discussed.
Fast forward 20 years later. We had, just a few weeks ago, the first UNESCO Global Summit for platform governance and freedom of expression. Now we have to look at tech innovation and tools that will advance, that will permit us to get to the next level of prosperity, redistributed wealth, while using the Internet to increase sustainable international trade, healthcare across borders, and support biodiversity in the high-seas.
We have to:
First: We have to commemorate the agreement on the Treaty of the High Seas. Technology will play an immense role on the discovery and cataloguing of species, so national programs for innovation must invest in research in the deep sea. We have private and public partnerships like the Tara Ocean Foundation, but we need more.
Second: We need to address skilling of women and girls in digital tools so they can actively participate in the digital economy and partake of its bounties. Better paying jobs, creating tools, developing programs, not mindless underpaid soul-crushing data entry. We have to stop below poverty level jobs being shipped to the Global South.
Third: We need a skilled force in engineering, math, and natural sciences with a broad education in the social sciences, the humanities, the arts. For that, we commend private sector actors: Salesforce, Microsoft, and Google. They are proactively working in partnership with the UN and the ITU to deploy training and tools in the developing world, the LDCs, and in Sub-Saharan Africa.
These private sector partnerships are fundamental for government sector administrators and UN officials to acquire the knowledge necessary for them to evaluate the technologies that they employ and acquire for their organisations.
The private sector has another role too: they can also help scale up commercial opportunities, with governance and policies in place that create shared wealth.
But none of these aspirations can take place unless governments and multilateral organisations invest in media literacy and digital infrastructure. Both within their institutions and in the programs that they roll-out.
To register click here.
Catch up on some statistics on Internet growth here.
New York
67th session of the Commission on the Status of Women
Interview with the Minister of Finance and Gender Equality of Greenland
The sixty-seventh session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW67) is being held from 6 to 17 March 2023 at the United Nations Headquarters (UN HQ) in New York under the theme Innovation and technological change, and education in the digital age for achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls.
Listen to my interview with Naaja H. Nathanielsen, Minister of Finance and Gender Equality of the Government of Greenland. She was participating at a panel in New York.
UNESCO Global Summit
All Panels Are Online
Draft 2.0 of the Guidelines for regulating digital platforms: a multi-stakeholder approach to safeguarding freedom of expression and access information is now publicly available on the conference website. This draft was discussed during the Internet for Trust conference on 22 and 23 February.
AI for Good for ALL (including the robots)
Source: ITU
The AI for Good Global Summit, established in 2017, returns to Geneva in person for the first time since 2019. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, AI for Good transformed into a year-round online engagement platform bringing together a diverse range of participants from 183 countries.
Listen to my interview with Fred Werner, Head, Strategic Engagement at ITU.
This year's summit combines the best of the physical and virtual worlds, is expecting to welcome over 2,500 participants in Geneva alongside online participation from the over 15,000 members of ITU's fast-growing AI-powered community platform, the AI for Good Neural Network. Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics innovators—and their high-tech creations—will join humanitarian leaders in Geneva, Switzerland, 6-7 July, for the latest edition of the global summit advancing AI to drive sustainable development.
The two-day AI for Good Global Summit organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) will demonstrate how new technologies can support the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in areas such as combatting the climate crisis and bolstering humanitarian response.
The AI for Good Global Summit will feature eight humanoid social robots and over 20 specialized robots, being brought together for the first time under the same roof. The robots will showcase capabilities ranging from fighting fires and delivering aid to providing healthcare and farming sustainably.
Two high-level roundtables – featuring government officials, industry executives, academics, and UN partners – will explore the policies, regulations, and standards needed for AI to advance sustainable development.
The event will emphasize networking to build new projects, calls to action, and partnerships. AI for Good's dynamic show floor will also include AI-inspired performances and artwork.
ITU connects the world
AI for Good is organized by ITU, the UN specialized agency for information and communication technologies, together with 40 partner UN agencies. The summit is co-convened by the government of Switzerland.
ITU's global membership includes 193 Member States and – uniquely in the UN system – over 900 companies, universities, and international and regional organizations.
Member States at ITU's governing Plenipotentiary Conference in 2022 adopted a resolution supporting the tech agency's work across the UN system to realize the benefits of AI for sustainable development.
The two-day AI for Good Global Summit at the International Conference Centre Geneva is preceded by machine learning workshops on 5 July led by experts from the AI of Good Discovery series.
Where human and robot minds meet
Speakers highlight:
Lila Ibrahim – Chief Operating Officer, DeepMind
Orly Lobel – Warren Distinguished Professor of Law, University of San Diego, and author of "The Equality Machine" (among The Economist's best books of 2022)
Stuart Russell - Professor of Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley, and author of "Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control"
Alessandra Sala – Senior Director of AI & Data Science, Shutterstock, and President, Women in AI
Babak Hodjat – Chief Technology Officer for AI, Cognizant
Andrew Zolli – Chief Impact Officer, Planet
Guests of Honour will be … the robots!
Beonmi – the world's first fully functional general-purpose humanoid robot (Beyond Imagination)
Nadine - one of the world's most realistic humanoid social robots (University of Geneva)
Sophia - first robot Innovation Ambassador for the United Nations Development Program (Hanson Robotics)
Geminoid – ultra-realistic humanoid robot from Japan (Hiroshi Ishiguro)
4NE-1 – one of the world's most advanced cognitive humanoid robots designed to collaborate with humans (Neura Robotics)
Ai-Da Robot – first ultra-realistic robot artist (Aidan Meller)
Grace – the world's most advanced humanoid healthcare robot (SingularityNET)
Desdemona – the rockstar robot of the Jam Galaxy Band