Agenda

Mr. Houlin Zhao was first elected 19th Secretary-General of the ITU at the Busan Plenipotentiary Conference in October 2014. He took up his post on 1 January, 2015.  ITU Member States re-elected Mr. Zhao as ITU Secretary-General on 1 November 2018. He began his second ​four-year term on 1 January 2019.
Prior to his election, he served two terms of office as ITU Deputy Secretary-General (2007-2014), as well as two terms as elected Director of ITU's Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (1999-2006).

Mr. Zhao is committed to further streamlining ITU's efficiency, to strengthening its membership base through greater involvement of the academic community and of small- and medium-sized enterprises, and to broadening multistakeholder participation in ITU's work.

Xiaoya Yang serves as the Counselor of ITU-T Study Group 17 ‘security’ since 2017. With 20+ years of professional experience in telecommunication regulation, legislation and international standardization and coordination, she was the Head of the WTSA Programmes Division in the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-TSB) from 2010 to 2016, Co-counsellor of ITU-T Study Group 2 on 'Operational aspects of service provision and telecommunications management' and Study Group 3 on 'Tariff and accounting principles including related telecommunication economic and policy issues' from 2009 to 2010; Counselor of ITU-T Study Group 17 on 'Telecommunication security' from 2007 to 2008; and Workshop Project Coordinator from 2004 to 2006. Before joining ITU, she worked in the Ministry of Information Industry of China from 1998 to 2004. There she was the Division Director responsible for regulation of Internet and information security. From 1997 to 1998 she worked in China Telecom as a network engineer and service manager in their Internet service department. She has a M.S. in Computer Science from Tsinghua University, China and a MBA from Polytechnic University, Hong Kong.

Ms. Xiaoyuan Bai is in charge of the field of cybersecurity and information security standardization in Ant Group. She is mainly engaged in standardization work in data security, biometric authentication, anti-spam, blockchain security and other related area.

Ms. Xiaoyuan Bai serves as ITU-T SG17 WP4 vice-chair and Q14/17 associate rapporteur, and chair of IEEE-SA MPC (secure multi-party computation) working group, etc. As the project leader, she has formulated more than 30 standards in the field of cybersecurity and information security, and nearly 20 standards have been published. Some of the standards have been awarded as the China Standards Innovation and Contribution Award, etc. because of the wide application of the standards and good socio-economic benefits.

Juan R. Troncoso-Pastoriza (PhD in Telecom Engineering by the Univ. of Vigo, 2012) is the CEO and Co-founder of the EPFL start-up Tune Insight SA (https://tuneinsight.com). He has more than 15 years of experience in information security, applied cryptography, and privacy protection. During this time, he has participated and carried out the scientific coordination of several European and national projects related to information security and privacy protection, an area in which he has co-authored more than 60 articles in international peer-reviewed journals and conferences, and holds six granted international patents.
In recent years, he has actively participated in industry initiatives for the standardization of Homomorphic Encryption (homomorphicencryption.org) and in the design and development of the award-winning Multiparty Homomorphic Encryption library Lattigo (https://github.com/tuneinsight/lattigo). He is currently a member of the steering committee of the HEBench initiative aimed at enabling a flexible benchmarking framework for Homomorphic Encryption. In 2021, he co-founded the start-up Tune Insight SA, whose mission is to orchestrate collaborations on sensitive data with advanced privacy and confidentiality technologies in health, cyberdefense and financial services.

Andrew is a PhD student at the University of Oxford. He is also a passionate AI teacher, having taught 2 different introductory AI courses (12K+ enrollments each) and written an introductory Deep Learning book which has sold over 10K copies. He also started and leads OpenMined, an open source community of over 5000 researchers, engineers, and enthusiasts dedicated to making the concepts and tools necessary for privacy preserving AI reach mainstream adoption. He is also a member of the United Nations Privacy Task Force, raising awareness and lowering the barrier-to-entry for the use of privacy preserving analytics within the public sector.

Narendra Nath Gangavarapu, is working as Joint Secretary, National Security Council Secretariat with
responsibilities for coordination and monitoring implementation in matters of cyber security R&D and
activities by different entities of India in the government, public and private sectors and in
International bilateral and multilateral relations and in various international fora. Prior to this he was
Deputy Director General, Department of Telecommunications, Government of India with overall
responsibilities for the policy formulation and implementation and matters pertaining to Telecom
network security of India.

He has over 30 years of in the areas of Network Security and Law Enforcement assistance, Network
planning, installation, operation & maintenance, training, marketing of services and business
development. He was conferred with the award of Sanchar Shiromani by the department of
Telecommunications. He was associated with Telecommunications Standards Development Society of
India (TSDSI) as member of the GC. He was also a Director on the board of Tata Communications
Limited and is currently on the board of NIXI. He is the coordinating chair for India for the Quad Critical
and Emerging Technologies Working Group.

He holds a Masters in Technology from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi with specialization in
VLSI design.

Dr. Cécile Aptel is Deputy Director of UNIDIR. She has over 20 years’ experience in international affairs, working for several UN entities, universities and NGOs on legal, policy, international security and humanitarian issues. She has built and managed diverse international teams in multicultural environments, ensuring accountability and a high level of performance.

Prior to joining UNIDIR, she served as a Chief in the UN Human Rights Office, and before that as Director and Acting Under-Secretary General at the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent. 

She has helped set-up various new entities, notably the UN Mechanism on Syria (IIIM), and led several international investigations, including in Lebanon (IIIC), the UN Office of Internal Oversight, and the UN Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. She has been a consultant for UNICEF, the UN Office on Drugs and Crimes, and the International Center for Transitional Justice. She was awarded the 2010 Jennings Randolph Senior Fellowship by the United States Institute of Peace. 

Dr. Aptel holds a Ph.D. in law from the University of Geneva and master’s degrees from the College of Europe and Trinity College Dublin. She is also a professor of international law and recognised for her expertise in international humanitarian law, criminal law, transitional justice, and human rights, notably child rights. She has authored over 30 publications and taught at the Fletcher School, Pretoria, and Harvard. She is fluent in French and English.

Gretchen Bueermann is a research and analysis specialist at the World Economic Forum’s Centre for Cybersecurity, where her primary focus is on cyber resilience and cybercrime initiatives. Previously, she was a data scientist at the International Organization for Migration (UN Migration), where she was the co-lead of the Data Science and Ethics Group and focused on predictive analytics and privacy for complex humanitarian emergencies. Prior to UN Migration, Gretchen worked at the Behavioral Science Research Lab at the Yale School of Management. She has a MA in Development Economics from Yale University and a BA in Economics from Reed College.

Fabien Jacquier is Founder and Managing Director of Kyos SA, an IT service company based in Geneva, Switzerland and specialized in the field of IT security. Fabien is an experienced security engineer with expertise in Business Management, Cyber Security, Key Management and Data Protection. 

Kyos proposes its services in the fields of security, networks and information and related solutions. It aims at making the use of IT as simple, efficient, and secure as possible. A company with over 50 employees, its priority is to establish relationships of trust with its customers and partners. 

Businesses’ information systems are increasingly open, with data stored in the cloud, making a data centric vision of security a key priority. Kyos has strong experience in security architecture, secured cloud migration services, including consulting and solutions for compliance, privacy and data protection like encryption, key management, tokenization, pseudonymization and data masking.