Latin America

eduroam (education roaming) is the secure, worldwide roaming access developed for the international research and education community. eduroam is now available in 76 countries worldwide and is expanding beyond campuses to public, commercial and city Wi-Fi initiatives.

In November 2015, the bursting of the dam of a mining company caused one of the largest environmental disasters ever recorded in Brazil. Over 60 billion liters of mining tailings reached the Doce River basin, and mud flooded the river and its tributaries, causing irreversible damage to the environment. RNP's web conference platform helped researchers co-ordinate their response to this disaster.

Jorge Santiago Jacinto, who is profoundly deaf, is a member of the Mexican deaf community. He is also the founder of SEVIDA, a series of virtual seminars hosted and recorded using the video conferencing platform VC-CUDI, provided by the Mexican research and education network CUDI.

Think of a dance performance in which the dancers, instead of sharing the same stage, are in different cities or even other continents. That is the mission of telematics dance, approaching dancers who are not necessarily in the same physical space, and creating other experience relations with the body and technological resources.

A group of 50 Brazilian researchers shall partake in the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope project, deemed as revolutionary for Astronomy. Totaling R$ 1 billion in investments, the Telescope will be able to map almost half of the sky in six filters for a period of ten years and its deluge of data will be a huge challenge for information technology.

Have you ever stopped to think about how weather and climate research influence your daily life? “This science has a direct impact on the daily lives of us all, from small decisions, such as whether to bring a coat or an umbrella or not, to government analyses, such as whether there will be enough water in the reservoirs of the dams of the hydroelectric power plants to produce electricity.”

Latin America plays a vital role in the worldwide computing grid essential for processing the massive amounts of data generated from particle smashing experiments at the Large Hadron Collider that reveal information about the origins of the Universe.

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.