Welcoming Address

Suk-Gwon Chang, President of the KATP

Excellencies, distinguished scholars, industry professionals, ladies and gentlemen!

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome all of you to the KATP-CITI International Joint Symposium. I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks to Prof. Eli Noam, Director of Columbia Institute for Tele-Information, for co-organizing this exciting event. I am also grateful to Prof. Eric Bohlin, chair of International Telecommunications Society, and Prof. Johannes Bauer from Michigan State University, for joining us to present European and American case studies. Also, we have a special guest from Japan, Prof. Minoru Sugaya, president of Japan Society of Information and Communication Research. He flew to Seoul to congratulate this symposium. I really appreciate all guest speakers, discussants and participants from overseas and also from Korea.

As you might have noticed, “make smart” is becoming a new and strong megatrend these days in every segment of ICT market including device, network, platform, service and applications. We might call this “smart revolution,” which will hopefully lead us to a smarter society. So far, we don’t have a clear picture of the smarter society. One may imagine an autonomous society well equipped with and supported by a variety of intelligent digital infrastructures and intelligent devices in our office, home and even in public spaces. However, nobody can be sure what it should be. The only thing we can say for sure is that the future smart society will be built depending on what we prepare for and what we do now.

In this sense, smart application development environment is most critical in our way toward a smarter society. That’s the reason why so many advanced countries eager to build national ultra-broadband smart networks as early as possible. The problem is that this is a quite tough and challenging target, presumably resorting to a market mechanism. In today’s symposium, we want to explore market-driven smart application developments, network business models for smart applications, and most importantly, market-based network policies for promoting investments to the future ultra-broadband smart network. It is my hope that this symposium becomes a precious platform for exchanging and sharing business and policy insights among participants in a global context.

Finally, I wish to extend my special thanks to the organizing committee members and the industry partners, KT, SKT, and LG U+, for providing financial supports and for sharing with us the most current strategic issues for discussion. Also, I would like to appreciate session chairs’ every effort to guide the presentations and discussions and making them more stimulating and productive.

I wish all of you a most exciting day of interesting discussions and sharing of valuable insights.

Thank you.