To celebrate the CCITT/ITU-T 60th Anniversary, a series of talks were held during the WTSA-16 Plenary sessions on Wednesday, 26 October. The evening of 26 October also hosted a gala reception, sponsored by theUnited ArabEmirates, the Republic of Koreaand Rohde&Schwarz.
2016 marks 60 years since ITU Member States established the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (CCITT) in 1956, the precursor to ITU-T, established in 1992. The 60th anniversary of CCITT/ITU-T celebrated the many experts that contributed their time and expertise to the development of the ITU standards that bring cohesion to the unceasing innovation of the ICT community.
Talks on digital financial services were held discussing how globally, more than 2 billion adults do not have a formal bank account. Low levels of financial inclusion represent a barrier to socio-economic development. Mobile money could be a game-changer for people of limited income and an enabler for financial inclusion in developing countries. The recent growth of Digital Financial Services has allowed millions of people previously excluded from the formal financial system to perform financial transactions relatively cheaply, securely and reliably.
Policy reform and the development of international standards will be important in facilitating the adoption of interoperable Digital Financial Services.
On the other side, there were talks on artificial intelligence as well. The future will see large parts of people’s lives influenced by AI technology. Machines can execute repetitive tasks with complete precision, and with recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), machines are gaining the ability to learn, improve and make calculated decisions in ways that will enable them to perform tasks undertaken by journalists, teachers, doctors and other professions previously thought to rely on human experience and ingenuity. AI will also come to support emerging applications in the IoT space, with billions of devices, things and objects gaining the ability to learn from patterns observed in their environment and communicate these learnings to a larger ecosystem of intelligent devices.
The development and adoption of relevant international standards will help people to realize the benefits of AI advances on a global scale
