The University of Antioqua (UdeA) is one of the top research institutions in Colombia, and a crucial potential partner in the development and implementation of this project. Its importance demanded several days of learning, talking and making contacts.
As mentioned in my UNC-M post, UdeA has a lot of research going on in the theoretical realm. Some of this research extends beyond the reading of journals or manipulating open-source data to come up with new ideas. Many researchers at UdeA use local resources and external collaborations to publish internationally recognized work.
Professors Carlos Duque of the Solid State research group, and Professor Diego Restrepo of the High Energy/Particle Physics research group, helped guide me through the well-advanced techniques of their respective groups.
Professor Duque has collaborations with professors in several countries (though principally in Brazil, Mexico and Cuba), utilizes both pregrad and postgrad students in research activities, and his sub-group (primarily focused on semi-conductors) has around 140 international publications within the past 10 years.
Professor Restrepo utilizes contacts throughout Colombia, foreign institutions, students, and modern technological resources, to publish high-level ideas and results. Professor Restrepo showed me some open-source platforms and software that he uses, like MathJax and GitHub, that have obvious direct application to this project.
Research at UdeA is not without it's severe limitations, however. Funding for research is better at UdeA, as it relies not only on ColCiencias, UdeA itself, and foreign collaborators, but money from the state of Antioqua as well, but is still lacking in several key areas. Scholarships for postgrads, money for visiting conferences, and tangible resources like computer clusters and some basic experimental potential for testing local ideas, are still essentially nonexistent. There is also a somewhat troubling system in place for paying salaries directly based upon number of publications (almost regardless of what the research or results are..."publish or perish" is certainly an issue everywhere, but this policy implies innately lower standards) that arguably helps breed less respectable research (this is speculation, but maybe this is one of many reasons why Professors at UdeA have trouble forming lasting collaborations with "first-world" institutions; the majority of collaborating foreign institutions are either in Latin America, the former Soviet Bloc, or the Middle East). In addition, many professors lack the ability to get recently published international articles in a timely fashion, as the University has not paid for access to many of the reviews. Professors either have to pay out-of-pocket or email the authors in hopes of a prompt response with the full-text article.
Professors Pablo Cuartas and Jorge Zuluaga, both of whom work in AstroPhysics theory, helped articulate some of the limitations that the less-fortified research groups at UdeA suffer from, and offered some directly applicable ideas for my proposed platform. Professor Zuluaga, for example, stressed the need for software centralization, in addition to idea and data sharing that I'd been focusing on. What this means is that with a centralized investigation platform, not only would researchers make research topics and certain results more accessible, but the tools for getting those results as well. With a centralization of the software and access to resources capable of handling them (again, computer clusters), researchers from established research institutions that lack access to these costly resources could send their "job" into this centralized interface and get it processed more efficiently. This idea opens possibilities that I previously hadn't considered.
There were also many informal chats with a large number of students, pregrad and postgrad, extending from physics to math and chemistry. The interest shown by the students, along with the one-on-one talks with professors, and a meeting with the physics faculty director Professor Johans Restrepo (this one was more like a job interview; it reminded me why I'm out of the standard job market and formal academia for the time being!), coagulated into the scheduling of an official "seminar."
This was a good chance to get more serious and organized about exactly what it is that I'm trying to accomplish here, and to speak in a more formal way (in Spanish) in front of an audience of potential collaborators.
It wasn't exactly a sold-out crowd, but nonetheless was fantastic practice as to how to best present this concept. The response was positive, and when I returned two days later, word of my mission had spread, and there were numerous people who wanted to talk about the project and find out how to get involved.
Overall, UdeA impressed and encouraged me, and was a big step on this steep climb.
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