Director of GCCEI Invited as Panel for ‘Digital Societies Policy Forum’ in Bangkok

Digital Societies Policy Forum 2017 was recently held in Bangkok, Thailand. The event was hosted by International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Global System for Mobile communications Association (GSMA) and Ministry of Digital Economy and Societies (MDES) of Thailand, the Australian government, APT, Internet Society, Ericsson, and Qualcomm.

Faced with the era of 4th industrial revolution, Thai Government has been trying to deal with the wave effectively, and so its digital economy ministry MDES decided to hold the forum in collaboration with ITU and GSMA, inviting around 300 people from 20 countries in Asia-Pacific Region. The main focuses were digital societies, smart cities, hyper-connected societies, digitalization and the collaboration between private and public sectors.

Speakers and panels invited were from World Bank, Ericsson, Samsung Electronics, dtac, GSMA, ITU, SK Telecom and a Korean public accelerator GCCEI. David Sehyeon Baek, Director of GCCEI, was invited as a panel at the forum to discuss smart cities and collaboration with governments in the session of “Smart Cities and Key Lessons in our Physical Environment.”

Jeanine Vos, Executive Director of Connected Living at GSMA presided over the session in attendance of Mike Lee, EVP at Far EasTone (Taiwan), Klee Aiken, External Relations Manager at APNIC (Australia) and David Sehyeon Baek, Director of Global Cooperation & Marketing at GCCEI (Korea), discussing a few hot issues about smart cities.

Mike Lee said that what’s most important in building a smart city is to listen to the opinions of the citizens in the target city. For this, his company had as many town-hall meetings as possible and listened to their needs, trying the best to engage them. And he showed how a smart city was helpful and effective in bringing good services to the population through all those data collected.

“Each city has its own problems, therefore, it’ll be crucial to conduct case studies on how the city has resolved the problems by using technologies such as IoT and big data. People have to be careful not to build a smart city for the sake of smart city. “One-size-doesn’t-fit-all” is something that we need to take into account,” Klee Aiken said. 

David Sehyeon Baek said that the very reason why we build a smart city is that we would like to resolve the problems the city has. You need try to solve the problems with or without relying on technologies, depending on the situation. After all, building a high-tech city doesn’t necessarily mean building a smart city, unless the rich high technologies resolve the existing problems and bring happiness to the citizens as the human-centered facilities.