Universidad Nacional de Colombia-Bogota

Considered Colombia's top University, the Universidad Nacional de Colombia' (UNAL) in Bogota (there are seven satellite campuses, including the one I visited in Medellin) is a massive mix of positives and negatives.

Being so large, and the focus of many of Colombia's, especially ColSciencias (the Colombian NSF) research initiatives, there is a lot going on here. I focused most of my attention on interactive learning initiatives going on in math and the sciences, but also was introduced to the diverse range of scientific research, social programs and cultural activities in the works at UNAL.

There are over 50,000 students, and the physics department alone has over 70 professors, to give an idea of the scale. There are well-established masters programs in all the sciences, and PhD programs exist, albeit with some inevitable issues. Post-docs, again, are not much of a presence here, due to lack of funding, but a push is happening for this to change.

I was introduced to Professor Rafael Hurtado by Professor Carlos Quimbay, who had subsequently been introduced to me by Professor Yeinzen Rodriguez at UIS in Bucaramanga. All are top Colombian particle physicists, but it's Professor Hurtado's new participation in virtual post-graduate teaching, along with his branching out into various social and development programs at the national level that grabbed my interest (I learned a great deal about a lot of things through our extensive talks).

Professor Hurtado teaches a graduate-level course entitled "SocioPhysics." It utilizes "TIC's," or "Tecnologias de Informacion y Communcacion," to create a mixed local/virtual semi-interactive learning environment.  Students in disciplines ranging from physics to biology to electrical engineering take the course in Bogota, Medellin and Manizales, all campus's of UNAL.

Professor Hurtado normally gives the course from Bogota, but I was able to sit in on two lectures, one "virtually," where he was in Medellin, and the second lecture while we were both in Bogota.

The course is structured as a combination of video-conference, with a camera, screen, and single microphone in each respective classroom,  along with a tablet that translates from the tablet screen to a virtual blackboard and computer screen, which immediately appears on the screen and virtual tablet in the distance classroom. There are also options of doing prepared power-point presentations, live document exchange, and more.

While there are some issues, not least of all the quality of the sound, which limits interactivity, the course does work, and this is the first time this course has been given, and the first time I've encountered an attempt at upper-level e-learning. Very interesting and very encouraging.

Professor Hurtado's colleague, and Italian physicist named Rafaelli Fazio, also incorporates some technological components to his Quantum Field Theory graduate course. He won a grant from the International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy, to use their OpenEya software and technology (a couple of cameras). One camera films Professor Fazio live at the blackboard, the other is a zoom that can be scaled over sections of the blackboard to better see the details of what he's writing. There is a 15-20 second delay between the two images, limiting the practicality of a live virtual instruction, but it is a useful tool for his students in Bogota for after the lecture. There seems to be good potential for this technology if an improvement can be made in the delay.

I had talks with many other individuals and groups interested in my project, and wanting to offer their perspectives and aspirations.

I spoke to Raul Ramos, a Spanish post-doc working on a "telemedecina" initiative that would connect doctors in Bogota and other urban center,s with rural parts of Colombia.

I met with a representative from the Colombian Ministry of Education, Ingrid Lugo, who explained to me the intention of basic mathematics classes being taught virtually from UNAL to entering engineering and science students at universities around Colombia to ensure their math-levels are sufficient to process the oncoming technical courses (this important initiative is intended to counteract the greatly varying, but often deficient level of high-school math education). They are searching for the best platform to implement this initiative.

I spoke with the director of the physics department, Dr. Anderson Dussan, who spoke of well entrenched pre-grad e-learning courses offered through PEAMA (Programa Especial de Admision y Movilidad Academica), which are transmitted live to UNAL's satellite campus's.

PEAMA classrooms and their technological functionality were shown to me by one of its developers, the physicist Professor Plinio Teheran, along with two of his graduate students, one of whom, Rogelio Alvarado, is a student in Professor Hurtados SocioPhysics class.

Professor Teheran has not stopped with the development of PEAMA, however, which itself uses advanced technologies and well-structured virtual classrooms to successfully teach a wide-range of subject matters (one particularly cool tool was a whiteboard that had a camera placed at the upper-left corner; the professor puts a normal marker inside a virtual marker, writes normally on the board, and the camera picks up the movements of the virtual marker and translates the content onto a computer screen, which is then transmitted to the students...again, it doesn't work perfectly, but the technology exists and can be improved upon). He and his student administer a course entitled "taller tic y educacion matematica," given on weekends to high school teachers looking to better learn how to use information technologies to improve mathematical instruction.

In addition to it's important outward purpose, the course is also a research tool for Professor Teheran. He and his students toy with implementing various interactive learning tools, such as Google Docs and Google Excel, for inventive forms of instruction and evaluation. The parallels to their ambition with this course, whose platform they hope to improve upon and extend to PEAMA and beyond, with my ambitions for this project and the platform I hope to help create, were striking. They have a basic but working model and a lot of interesting ideas.

Universidad de los Andes

Colombia's top private university, UniAndes is relatively flush with resources. It's perhaps for this reason that UniAndes has become a sort of well-functioning, albeit isolated, academic and research island that hugs the eastern hills of Bogota.

Besides the cleanliness, modern buildings, well-dressed students and intense security (bomb-sniffing dogs abound!), a striking difference that sets UniAndes apart from most other Colombian academic institutions is their band-width.

Instead of utilizing the academic RedClara/Renata backbone, which functions at maximum of 200mbps (hopeful plans are in the works for expanding this), they operate on a commercial network that operates at something like 600-900mbps.

The higher band-width, accompanied by modern equipment, well-trained professors, and high standards of instruction and research, makes UniAndes the most internationally collaborative university in Colombia (on the other hand, I was hard-pressed to find researchers at UniAndes that worked with researchers from other national universities). In physics, there are grid-computing networks set up between UniAndes and CERN and UniAndes and FermiLab, capable of data-sharing and processing, high-quality video-conferencing, and other forms of virtual collaboration.

There are also upper-level virtual classes being taken at UniAndes streamed live from the University of Texas, successfully creating a mixed local/virtual audience.

With more money comes more freedom, and the professors at UniAndes do have a higher capacity to travel and choose their research topics. These fundamental research output generators are still well below developed-country institutional standards, however, as the average professor at UniAndes is funded to travel once annually.

A thanks is in order to physics department head Dr. Carlos Avila, an experimental particle physicist and fellow Cornell graduate, who introduced me to the standards of research at UniAndes and provided many insights as to how to proceed with this project. Also to Dr's Chad Leidy, Manu Forero and Juan Manuel Pedraza, all of Biophysics. It was especially fun batting around ideas with Manu and Juan Manuel, young researchers and full of bright ideas for how to create a collaborative virtual research platform.

I also had the privilege to speak to two major players in Colombia's networking initiatives. Dr. Andres Holguin is responsible for setting up the GRID networks between UniAndes and international partners, several virtual learning initiatives, and is an active developer in Colombia's national academic network, RENATA, as well as the Bogota municipal network, called RUMBO. Dr. Harold Castro is a systems engineer who also works closely with RENATA and RedClara and has an active interest in virtual research and learning development.

UniAndes, overall, is a research institute of international caliber. It's a shame that they don't use their relatively privileged stature to collaborate with other Colombian institutes, but for many bureaucratic and political reasons that I've become familiar with, it's somewhat understandable. There's some hope that the band-width of the academic wires through which RENATA functions will expand, leading UniAndes to switch over to RENATA and better connect with their local colleagues. Until then, it's a pleasure to see a university in a developing country functioning at such a high level.

Universidad Industrial de Santander

UIS is one of the top research universities in Colombia, but getting familiarized and connected to some more international network initiatives was the highlight of this visit.

Thanks to Dr. Yeinzon Rodriguez, a High-Energy physicist focused primarily on Inflation-theory, I was introduced to the research and funding processes at UIS. Again much of the funding comes through ColCiencias, but as at the Universidad de Antioqua in Medellin, there were a lot of funding options directly through grants at UIS as well. Dr. Rodriguez is even able to support a post-doc from Italy, Dr. Fabio Briscese (this is the first active post-doc in physics that I've encountered anywhere so far in Latin America).

Meeting Dr. Luis Nunez, a Cuban-born, Venezuela-educated physicist with a very global bent, was inspiring. Dr. Nunez is the Academic Director of the RedClara network. RedClara is the principal organizer of Latin American NREN's (National Research and Education Networks), and among many initiatives that they help foster, they are actively implementing wide-band Internet connections in Universities throughout Latin America (through “academic” wires, as opposed to "commercial").
As part of his position with RedClara, Dr. Nunez travels around Latin America, forming lasting collaborations between researchers in all types of research fields, and connecting them through RedClara. Dr. Nunez also works with other more specialized collaborative platforms, such as HELEN (High Energy LatinAmerican-European Network), VAMDC (Virtual Atomic and Molecular Data Center) and EELA ( E-Infrastructure shared between Europe and Latin America).


I learned a lot from our talk; from infrastructure and logistics, to limitations in technical resources. Dr. Nunez stressed the profound potential and desire to change and improve in the region. 


He was also in turn very interested in my ideas and objectives for forming a virtual collaborative research interface, and has offered to set me up with other active members of RedClara and related projects throughout Latin America. These contacts are essential for the success of this project.

SUE Caribe

What's going on at the public universities in northern Colombia is a testimony to vision, and an evident example of why what I'm determined to help develop is both desired and needed.

Sistema Universital Estatal de Caribe Colombiano (SUE Caribe) is a partnership between the seven major public Universities (Atlantico, Cartagena, Cesar, Cordoba, La Guajira, Magdalena, Sucre)  in the relatively underdeveloped northern states of Colombia (in comparison to the interior, which includes Bogota, Medellin and Cali).

These seven Universities decided to join forces to share resources to create previously inaccessible levels of higher learning and research. One such newly formed program, and the primary focus of this entry, is the "Maestria en Ciencias Fisica," a physics masters program.

Visits to the Universidad de Atlantica in Barranquilla, Universidad de Magdelena in Santa Marta, and the Universidad de La Guajira in Riohacha, generated some contacts and interest, but speaking with the director of the physics masters program, Dr. Cesar Orlando Torres Moreno at the Universidad Popular del Cesar, brought to light the ambition, energy and comprehensiveness of this initiative.

The stated objective of the program is to raise the level of scientific education and research skills in order to facilitate social, economic and academic development of the region and the country. It's the belief that well-prepared masters of physics, and eventually other disciplines through SUE Caribe, will both fortify industry and help generate a continuous cycle of building and improvement of educational standards at the coastal Colombian Universities.

Nationally accredited in 2006 (and in the process of being internationally accredited now), the physics masters program currently has 74 participating students between the seven Universities. Three standard courses are given at each University (electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics), but students are free to seek out mentors and elective courses at any of the seven Universities. In fact, students are given the option of finding mentors and research projects anywhere they wish, as long as they keep one local mentor at one of the seven SUE Universities.

Professors within SUE Caribe are often interchanged, and visiting professors from other Colombian and foreign institutions give seminars and courses, to better familiarize the students with available research areas, but also to help form and fortify collaborations amongst the professors themselves. The list of visiting professors to date is staggering, demonstrating a substantial international interest in the program, but visiting professors normally can only stay short periods of time due to the inability to continue their research projects while at the SUE universities.

The hope is that with the success and example of the physics masters program, SUE Caribe will form masters and doctoral programs in other basic science disciplines and mathematics. To date, a masters program in education, a doctoral program in environmental engineering, and a doctoral program in tropical medicine, have been formed through SUE Caribe and are up-and-running. The early stages of a doctoral program in physics are also taking shape. All have the same objective of sharing resources and interchanging personnel to create advanced programs and research projects that would otherwise be impossible at these Universities. I spoke with Dr. Lyda Castro, the director of the doctoral program in Tropical Medicine at the University of Magdalena in Santa Marta. While she acknowledged that there are still major limitations, especially funding for the students' research, she realizes that without SUE Caribe, much of her and her two current doctoral students' research, would be impossible.

There is another initiative, more in the idea stage but with a lot of support, worth mentioning. It's the ambition of Dr. Torres and others participating in the SUE Caribe program, that a centralized research institute can be formed that shares resources in all scientific disciplines in coastal Colombia. This institute would not only be for Colombians, but would be a center of research, development and education for students and researchers in Latin America that have suffered from a lack of resources and opportunity. A group of researchers from SUE Universities have a visit planned later this year to several Central American countries, in an attempt to understand how best to include them in this proposed research institute.

It was wonderful to see the ambition and progressiveness of these new programs and initiatives, but some limitations were also clearly evident. One was the prohibitive cost of pursuing a degree; it costs thousands of dollars per semester, which is money most Colombians, especially those just finishing a pre-grad degree, simply don't have. I met several students that wanted to participate in the masters program in physics, but had no way to pay, so were trying their best to find a foreign institute that offers scholarships (to date, ColCiencias, the Colombian science foundation, has been reluctant to give scholarships for advanced science degrees, and the Universities themselves appear to have a certain bureaucracy that makes lowering the costs or offering financial aid and scholarships a laughable topic).

Some other practical issues, such as the difficulty for students and professors to travel to take courses or develop research projects,  offers an opportunity to present how a centralized research and instruction platform, my project, could greatly help a program such as SUE Caribe.

Imagine an interface that allows an interactive environment for scientific research and teaching, live and virtual. A simulated research institute, if you will. Students can take classes at one University while seated at their home University. Professors can exchange ideas, data, software and publications with collaborators, and advanced students can seek out Professors for guidance. Conferences can be streamed virtually and offer online interactivity that would help develop collaborative relationships, and those collaborations could further be fostered by the same platform. This, in summary, is what we're talking about here for this project.

Now imagine this platform being accessible to a program like SUE Caribe. With their limited resources but a clear openness to connectivity, the benefits would be enormous. Students in Santa Marta could take a virtual course from Valledupar, while seeking out a tutor in Bogota or Madrid to work along with their mentor in Cartagena. The students and professors would also have access to more specialized courses and research groups from around the world, bringing their level to a more international standard. The higher level and better accessibility would make more students want to stay, greatly enhancing regional and national economic and academic development, SUE Caribe's stated purpose. The potential is limitless.

Cuba

Though I became familiar with multiple Universities and Institutes in Cuba, it seems best to describe these experiences as a single expose'.

Cuba has a fascinating educational system, from bottom to top. Solid primary education for all is often followed by competitive and rigorous (though perhaps sheltered) secondary education that then leads to a confusing choice of what to do next.

Talented scientific and mathematical minds are told by exam results (the exam, given in the final year of high school, is supplemented by a standardized book entitled "Que Quieres Estudiar?," or "What Do You Want to Study?," which supposedly helps encourage already focused students to take more relevant exams) what fields suit them best, but economic (and social) incentive is extremely lacking in Cuba to pursue higher level degrees, especially in the underfunded pure sciences. Coupled with an "information blockade" that makes relevant books, and most importantly, the Internet, completely inaccessible, the amount of minds prepared to eventually do scientific research is greatly depressed.

Those that do choose to pursue a career in science face a whole new course of obstacles. While the training is free, the choices of fields to specialize in are extremely limited, and one must commit to one to three years of civil service upon graduation(or sometimes before beginning University). For undergraduate students, all non-Cuban websites are blocked, and access to research journals is extremely limited.

At the University of Havana, students are granted a paltry 10mb data per month to download relevant content from a centralized university data system (full professors get 50mb). This is on a phone-line based network that conjures up memories from the first days of the Internet nearly 20 years ago, and the computers available to the students and professors are even older.

These students do receive very thorough and rigorous classroom educations, however, and while many graduate with less than comprehensive research experience, they are noticeably well-prepared in subject fundamentals.

Some advisers make major personal sacrifices for their students, in order for them to get more exposure and research experience. There's a sort of solidarity that seems to exist; everyone acknowledges that there are limitations, ranging from information access to resources to career advancement, but because all are in the same boat, they share what they do have (including their research data) to the best of their abilities. This is of course very different from typical highly competitive institutions around the world.

Due to the well-preparedness and the strong work-ethic of graduate-level science students in Cuba, some countries with far more resources, such as Brazil and Mexico, have taken an interest is forming "sandwich programs." Research is done by the Cuban students at institutes in these countries, and collaboration goes on between an advisor in Cuba and an advisor from the other piece of bread. The student then returns to Cuba and completes his masters or PhD degree. Somehow this works, even with the limitations of Internet and ancient data-processing systems in Cuba, and some significant internationally-recognized research is churned out (in physics, solid-state is of primary focus).

As a small aside, It's also worth mentioning that Cuba's biotechnology research is far more advanced than other sectors of scientific research and development, and is flush with foreign investment. Many students trained in physics and chemistry end up working in the biotechnology sector.

I'm avoiding specifics (any guesses why?), but there do exist progressively minded professors, and especially students, who are well aware of the deficiencies of their current programs. The things that need to be done to get Cuba up-to-speed and better included in global scientific research efforts are numerous and complex, but there is one glaringly obvious issue. Open and better Internet access must be available to students and professors (and everyone, but that's a separate and related issue) in order for them to achieve the potential that their rigorous training and keen and motivated minds allow.

This project stresses the consolidation and utilization of technology that is far beyond what exists in Cuba at present. I sincerely hope this changes. It would be a shame to see such capable scientists fall farther behind.

Universidad de Antioqua

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.

Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana

Visiting UPB was an opportunity to see how private Universities function in Colombia, and to expand my horizons beyond pure science research.

Research at UPB is almost exclusively focused on Engineering, and heavily relies upon ColCiencias and foreign institutions for funding. Large projects are in the works, however, and the utilization of technology for higher learning is actively being considered.

I met with Emiro and Andres Diez, a father/son team within the Electrical Engineering department. Through them, I was introduced to the director of the Electrical Engineering department, the head of technological development for the entire University, various researchers and developers within the school of Engineering, and with the director of the Engineering school himself.

Andres took me around to see labs and equipment, and an impressive electrical trolley project he works on, which utilizes French funds and Belarusian vehicles. The hope is that in the coming years, this energy efficient initiative will have a strong-hold in Medellin and Bogota.

There was a lot of interest in what I was doing, and I felt a little overwhelmed by how applicable all I've been working on is to these branches of research as well. They suffer from many of the same limitations I'd become familiar with, but already have structures in place for better sharing experimental resources. Utilizing technology to make resource-sharing more efficient, and to better prepare prospective researchers, could be a huge step for engineering Universities.  It will be interesting to explore the best ways to extend and connect pure science research and upper-level classwork to more applied, experimentally oriented research and instruction.