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ICTP has been selected as a centre of excellence by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the United Nations specialized agency for information and communication technologies. Under the ITU's capacity building initiative known as the ITU Academy, ICTP will offer training in the fields of Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data and Statistics. These fields are now of strong interest not only in industrialized countries but also in the developing world, as they can provide valuable applications to address the Sustainable Development Goals.
ICTP and the ITU share a long history of training for developing countries. Through ICTP's Telecommunications/ICT for Development (T/ICT4D) unit, ICTP has organized educational activities on state-of-the-art wireless technologies, including IoT. ICTP focusses on using wireless solutions to help the development of academic networks in emerging regions of the world. In the last few years, ICTP has organized more than 30 workshops on IoT both at ICTP and in developing countries. Indeed, the Centre is currently holding a Workshop on Rapid Prototyping of Internet of Things Solutions for Science to share good practices on how IoT nodes can be rapidly prototyped to carry out scientific measurements.
Out of five ITU centres of excellence in the world dedicated to IoT and Big Data and Statistics, ICTP has been chosen as the European representative. Given ICTP’s mission, the ITU Centre of Excellence at ICTP will also attend to the needs of participants from the developing world.
"ICTP and the ITU share the same vision: to provide capacity building on state-of-the-art technology that is relevant to developing countries," said ICTP's Marco Zennaro, a research officer with the T/ICT4D unit. He added, "I look forward to an even closer collaboration in the field of Internet of Things and Big Data and Statistics.” Zennaro, together with colleague Clement Onime of ICTP's Information and Communication Technology section, will organise four ITU training activities in 2019, two for IoT and two for Big Data, starting in the summer.
