Latin America

Engineers and medical doctors from a number of institutions in Mexico participate in telemedicine projects with their peers in Asia that enable the exchange knowledge and development of new techniques to help with the diagnosis and treatment of diseases.

Whenever she needed to do an eye examination, seamstress Ana do Nascimento used to wake up before sunrise, take a bus that took two hours to get to downtown Goiânia and spend the entire morning in a public hospital. Today, thanks to ICT, the “examination day” is no more than 30 minutes.

Undersea cables are being installed along Amazon riverbeds to deliver connectivity to remote communities, providing access to education and supporting regional development.

When the Latin American Observatory of Extraordinary Events announced in October 2011 that rainfall was expected to be above average for the South American Northwest and above average for the Southeast of the same region, an early alert for floods was issued for Panama, Colombia and Venezuela, and one of a drought for North-western Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. This is an example of how the information gathered and disseminated by the Observatory, a collaboration involving a number of institutions, helps Latin American nations with risk management for extreme environmental events.

Thanks to the Mylims platform, scientists around the world are able to process and manipulate data, interpret results and compare them with spectra obtained by other users and those stored in databases, thus accelerating the understanding of compounds. Mylims has already led to breakthroughs in the diagnosis of illnesses, such as leukaemia, and has become a valuable tool for food chemists to detect fraudulent coffee.

Over the last decade, ESR - Escola Superior de Redes (Superior School of Networks) has significantly contributed to the advancement of ICT across Brazil. An initiative of RNP (the Brazilian NREN), ESR offers courses to address issues in the areas of Management and Network Design, IT Governance, Security, Support to Digital Collaboration Media and System Administration. This successful training model has now been rolled out to other countries in Latin America and further afield, where RNP partners up with the respective NREN to provide expertise and qualification.

Launched in April 2015, the first Chilean Virtual Observatory (ChiVO) is an astro-informatic platform for the administration and analysis of massive data coming from the observatories built across the country. Its implementation will provide advanced computing tools and research algorithms to the Chilean astronomical community.