Oliver Cann, Public Engagement, World Economic Forum, +41 79 799 3405, oliver.cann@weforum.org
· Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution has created or piloted up to 20 governance protocols since its opening in March 2017
· Rapid international expansion of the Network continues with new Affiliate Centres announced in Rwanda, Turkey and Brazil
· World leaders will gather in San Francisco in April 2020 for the inaugural Global Technology Governance Summit
· For more information, please visit www.weforum.org. Share on social media using the hashtag #wef20
Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, 24 January 2020 – Technology governance has evolved from a nice-to-have to a global necessity. For the past three years, the World Economic Forum Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Network has brought together governments, businesses, start-ups, and civil society at large to develop governance policies and frameworks for emerging technologies.
Based on increasing interest to engage in projects, the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Network’s footprint expanded to include Forum-led Centres in China, India and Japan and Affiliate Centres in United Arab Emirates, Colombia, Israel, Norway, South Africa and Saudi Arabia. This Annual Meeting, we are pleased to welcome Rwanda, Turkey and Brazil as new Affiliate Centres. Operated by host governments, these Centres work with projects across the Network to accelerate and scale impact.
“Rwanda is proud to partner with the World Economic Forum, an organization with whom we share similar values around using policy for results and leveraging partnerships for sustainable impact,” said Minister Paula Ingabire, Minister of Information Communication Technology and Innovation, Rwanda. “We want to ensure our people, our enterprises and the government are enabled to harness new technologies for prosperity. We are excited to expand our partnership with the World Economic Forum to ensure that we build our capabilities in the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to continue to serve our people.”
“We are excited to join the World Economic Forum, Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Network,” said Mustafa Varank, Minister of Industry and Technology of Turkey. “Now, more than ever, it is time to act on a global level to accelerate the benefits of emerging new technologies. Together with the Turkish Employers Association of Metal Industries (MESS), we are taking remarkable steps to upskill and reskill our dynamic workforce. As well-known, thanks to new innovative tools, we are now able to solve many problems in health-care, education, mobility, manufacturing, agriculture, energy, urbanization etc. Having said that, there is a strong need for new regulatory rules and norms to protect human rights and sustain independency of the nations to reap the benefits of technological changes. All these can only be achieved by global cooperation among governments and institutions. Strengthening digital technologies and supporting innovation are the main objectives of our national strategy. Therefore, this Affiliate Centre will work across the Network by amplifying and scaling current national and regional practices. Given the high-level guidance and support from H.E. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, we will do our best to leverage cooperation among our Ministry, MESS and the World Economic Forum on this strategic priority.”
“We believe our collaboration will benefit both members of MESS and our country,” said Özgür Burak Akkol, MESS Chairman of the Board. “Our technology centre MEXT, which we have been working very hard on bringing to life is due to open soon, allowing us to transform our industry through digital transformation. Today, through this partnership, our role is carried to a global arena, and I have no doubt that the members of MESS will make the best out of this collaboration."
"Launching an Affiliate Centre in Brazil is an important step to ensure that the country benefits from the Fourth Industrial Revolution, leveraging investments in emerging technologies to increase productivity, competitiveness and social development,” said Carlos Da Costa, Deputy Minister of Economy, Brazil.
“This is a pioneering and innovative initiative by the government of São Paulo and the World Economic Forum,” said João Doria, Governor of the State of São Paulo. “The Fourth Industrial Revolution is a step towards the future, creating jobs, strengthening entrepreneurship and placing São Paulo on the world platform.”
Since March 2017, the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Network has created or piloted almost 20 frameworks or governance protocols. Highlights from each of our project areas follow.
Our Impact
- Draft guidelines for child protection were published in September 2019 in partnership with UNICEF and numerous governments to protect children in the age of artificial intelligence.
- Companies can adopt a practical framework and toolkit that helps board members be responsible stewards of their companies’ deployment of AI. Over 100 companies provided feedback for this project.
- Governments can adopt practical standards for effective and responsible procurement and deployment of AI – already piloted in the United Kingdom, UAE, and Bahrain -- which can transform government services while using market power to set standards for industry.
- The government of Singapore and the World Economic Forum created a Model AI framework and self-assessment checklist to help guide companies towards responsible use of this complex technology.
- New initiatives are driving governance of facial recognition technology and re-imagining regulation in the age of AI.
- As part of the Forum’s community of “ethics executives” from over forty technology companies, the Responsible Use of Technology Framework is a new way for organizations to integrate ethics and human rights into the technology development process, providing a step-by-step framework to counter societal risks from unchecked innovation.
- A first-of-its-kind holistic framework that prescribes specific approaches to security, accountability, transparency, auditability, equity and ethics can be used to overcome regulatory, commercial and social risks that stands in the way of businesses and governments sharing their data for social good. The framework is currently being adopted by numerous initiatives with governments, international organizations, companies and NGOs.
- A new a policy framework for personal data developed with the UAE helps governments to balance the risks and opportunities of emerging technologies
- Governments and businesses can adopt a policy framework for Unlocking Data for Healthy Living, including innovative ways to use data to detect, prevent and treat dementia and other ageing-related conditions, which are expected to triple by 2050, while also addressing broader issues of healthcare data governance along the way.
- New initiatives are creating new policies to enable cross-border data flows and reimagining ways to get meaningful user consent for data collection.
- The C4IR Network co-designed the world’s first agile, performance based approach to unmanned aircraft regulation. Rwanda has now implemented that policy for one year with positive effects on the domestic industry including scaling the first national scale drone delivery program 200x, enabling domestic drone operators to increase their service provision across Africa, and being chosen as host for the African Drone Forum in 2020 in collaboration with the Forum and the World Bank. The Forum is working with over 15 other countries to adopt the framework as well, which .
- The Advanced Drone Operations Toolkit highlights leading approaches to regulating or implementing drone policy in a modular framework to accelerate the use of drones for societally important uses. The toolkit was used by the first official United Nations International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Task Force on Unmanned Aircraft Systems for Humanitarian Aid and Development (TF-UHAD), to develop guidance on the safe operation of drones for humanitarian and development contexts. This toolkit is being piloted in the State of Telangana as part of the Medicine from the Sky project where significant progress has been made in enabling the state government to advance drone deliveries of vaccines, blood, and organs.
- The Forum is working with the City of Los Angeles to co-design innovative policies that would enable urban aerial mobility in the city and could be adopted the around.
- The “Blockchain Beyond the Hype” toolkit is helping organizations make informed and responsible decisions regarding investments and deployments of this potentially transformative technology.
- Over 45 Central Banks collaborated to tackle regulatory, security and inclusion challenges with the world’s first Central Bank Digital Currency Deployment Toolkit
- Companies and governments can adopt the Forum’s framework to ensure the interoperable, responsible and inclusive deployment of blockchains for supply chains, which has been piloted in multiple industries, geographies, and use cases – including with partners representing 85% of the world’s cocoa supply chain, Hitachi executives, 60 transport ministers from across the world and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) blockchain ecosystem through a new Blockchain Governance Accelerator in collaboration with C4IR UAE.
- New initiatives are using blockchain to combat corruption, co-designing effective cryptocurrency governance standards, creating effective blockchain regulation across sectors, aligning stakeholders behind a Blockchain Bill of Rights to protect users, and accelerating the effective use of smart contracts.
- Rural municipalities have a new tool to strengthen declining public transport networks. A Rural Public Transport Sustainability Index was developed and applied to nearly two dozen Japanese municipalities with aging and declining populations—diagnosing their transportation challenges and pointing the way to solutions.
- To help cities accelerate emissions reduction and address pressing climate risks, the Shared, Electric and Automated Mobility (SEAM) Governance Framework outlines a four-step process that can be adjusted to local contexts and it being piloted with cities around the world.
- Cities around the world looking to digitize their mobility infrastructure and integrate disparate mobility modes to promote efficiency and inclusivity can leverage the set of recommended issues by the Seamless Integrated Mobility System comparative analysis of integrated mobility systems.
- In partnership with the Forum, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority (SFMTA) has developed a paper that considers how Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles could potentially reduce the number and the severity of collisions that occur in San Francisco, which will be published later this year.
- C4IR Israel and the Israeli Ministry of are creating a comprehensive regulatory framework for the operation and commercialization of autonomous vehicles in Israel.
- New initiatives are enabling autonomous vehicle companies to share safety for more effective regulation and launching an Inclusivity Quotient to quantify the impact of mobility on socioeconomic equity, access to opportunity, core services and happiness.
- The Data for AV Safety Project was launched to build a library of scenario data which could form the basis of an operational safety assessment for AVs to help regulators develop and pilot effective regulation for automated vehicles (AVs).
- A landmark protocol on industrial IoT safety and security was co-designed by diverse stakeholders, and is now being utilized with public and private sector stakeholders from the aviation sector to establish a shared risk assessment framework to quantify and benchmark cyber resilience and exposure.
- The Government of Brazil collaborated with the Forum to develop new policy interventions to increase successful adoption of industrial IoT technologies by small and medium-sized enterprises in manufacturing. 130 companies are now piloting this protocol; an additional 2,000 companies will join by 2021.
- The Forum is serving as the secretariat of a new global effort, in collaboration with the G20 presidency, to establish and advance policy standards for the responsible and ethical use of smart city technologies. The G20 Global Smart Cities Alliance on Technology Governance represents more than 200,000 cities and local governments, leading companies, start-ups, research institutions, and civil society organizations – making it the largest and most ambitious undertaking of its kind.
- New initiatives are building consumer knowledge and trust in voice recognition systems, smart home devices and wearables, as well as driving more inclusive deployment of 5G and next-generation connectivity
To catalyse new approaches and collaborative efforts to shape these technologies for the benefit of society, the C4IR Network will convene the most influential government ministers, chief executives, civil society leaders, start-ups and international organizations from around the world for the inaugural Global Technology Governance Summit in April 2020 in San Francisco. This event will be the world’s premiere leader-level, multi-stakeholder meeting dedicated to shaping the governance of emerging technologies. In partnership with Apolitical, C4IR will announce the Agile 50 List to shine a spotlight on trailblazers of agile approaches to governance in the Fourth Industrial Revolution in hopes to inspire other public servants.
About the Annual Meeting 2020
The World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2020 takes place from 21 to 24 January 2020 in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland. The meeting brings together more than 3,000 global leaders from politics, government, civil society, academia, the arts and culture as well as the media. Convening under the theme, Stakeholders for a Cohesive and Sustainable World, participants focus on defining new models for building sustainable and inclusive societies in a plurilateral world. For further information, please click here.
Notes to editors
Watch live webcasts https://wef.ch/wef20
Guide to how to follow and embed sessions on your website at http://wef.ch/howtofollow
View the best photos from the event at http://wef.ch/pics
Read the Forum Agenda at http://wef.ch/agenda
Become a fan of the Forum on Facebook at http://wef.ch/facebook
Watch Forum videos at http://wef.ch/video
Follow the Forum on Twitter via @wef and @davos, and join the conversation using #wef20 and #FairerWorld
Follow the Forum on Instagram at http://wef.ch/instagram
Follow the Forum on LinkedIn at http://wef.ch/linkedin
Learn about the Forum’s impact on http://wef.ch/impact
Subscribe to Forum news releases at http://wef.ch/news
For searchable video content from the Annual Meeting click here