Cases & Voices

The TICAL Conference and the Latin American e-Science Meeting (August 30 to September 2, online) announced at the beginning of May the name of the Polish Pawel Świeboda as one of its main panelists. His nationality already sounds “different” to the Latin American public (it is the first time that the events will have a panelist from Poland) and his work area even more so: Świeboda is the General Director of the Human Brain Project (HBP), one of the world's largest research initiatives in the area of brain sciences. But… what does the human brain have to do with the research and education efforts promoted by NRENs and universities? The answer is... everything. And this is what you will read from now on in Cases and Voices.

Connectivity can be a major hurdle for global collaborative research organisations. Such initiatives are progressively taking centre stage as humanity seeks to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time and to answer questions about the universe.

Erik, when this issue is published at the end of March 2021, it will be exactly a year since the world was struck by the COVID-19 pandemic and GÉANT closed its offices in Amsterdam and in Cambridge. Let’s talk about managing an organisation from the home office. What are your major reflections after one year?

The Universidad Nacional Agraria (National Agrarian University - UNA), a member of the Nicaraguan University Network of Broadband (RUNBA), of the National Council of Universities (CNU), started on February 12, 2021, the connection of its data network to the global network through the IPv6 protocol. Through this action, RUNBA gained direct access to Google, Microsoft and AWS services through RedCLARA.

The Chilean academic network (REUNA) announced last March 16  the launch of the country's Telemedicine University Network, RUTE-Chile, the first network outside of Brazil in the field of health education and research of RUTE-Latin America.

(Press Release from the Pierre Auger Collaboration) The Pierre Auger Collaboration is releasing 10% of the data recorded using the world’s largest cosmic ray detector. These data are being made available publicly with the expectation that they will be used by a wide and diverse community including professional and citizen-scientists and for educational and outreach initiatives. While the Auger Collaboration has released data in a similar manner for over a decade, the present release is much wider with regard to both the quantity and type of data, making them suitable both for educational purposes and for scientific research. The data can be accessed at www.auger.org/opendata [1].