Cases & Voices

Important research being carried out in the University of Luxembourg’s Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) on Parkinson’s Disease is having a global impact. Global electronics giant Phillips and Portabilis came to LCSB to help them find the missing piece of the puzzle in their quest to develop a combined sensor to prevent falls in Parkinson’s patients. Phillips already had a sensor that could detect a fall and alert for help. But researchers believed that a combined sensor would make it possible to recognise an acute risk of falling before it happened and generate early enough alerts to call for help at the same time.

On our way to TICAL2019 and the 3rd Latin American e-Science Meeting, that will be held together between September 2-4, in Cancún, it’s time to know better the international speakers who will share their experiences with the region’s ICT and research communities. In our first interview we meet the President and CEO of the Canadian academic network CANARIE, Jim Ghadbane. Experienced leader in the ICT industry, as leader of CANARIE, Ghadbane is responsible for achieving the institution’s objectives, as indicated by the network agreement with the Government of Canada.  In this conversation, he shares some of his views on how NRENs can be relevant nowadays and gives us glimpses of his talk in TICAL.

The American Bruce Howe, third international speaker confirmed in TICAL and the e-Science Meeting, will bring to the plenary sessions of the events an issue that is more relevant than ever: the possibilities for NREN contributions in environmental issues, especially climate change and its consequences, like tsunamis and earthquakes. In this interview, Howe, who is a Research Professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and president of the international task force known as the “SMART Cable Initiative” (Science Monitoring And Reliable Telecommunication) shares his experience in the area and gives his opinion on how advanced networks can be allies for the preservation of the environment.

On February 12, the Special Interest Group (SIG) Neuromuscular Diseases from Rede Universitária de Telemedicina [Telemedicine University Network] (RUTE), lived a historic moment with the first collaboration session on telemedicine between Brazil and India. The meeting was attended by the National Coordinator of RUTE, Luiz Ary Messina, and drew attention to a lecture by Dr. U.K. Misra with the theme: “Neuromuscular disorders in tropical areas: up to date and challenges”. The Indian Professor of Neurology of the Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences has a worldwide recognized expertise on the subject, having already published more than 400 scientific articles in this area of study. In order for everything to go well during the meeting, there was a hard work of the technical support teams of RUTE in Brazil and the team in India, as well as the SARAH Network, performing all the required tests to guarantee the success of the connection quality.

He is the "father" of eduroam, plays important roles in GEÁNT and is an expert in Trust and Identity, a topic he will share with the Latin American ICT community between September 2 and 4, in Cancun, Mexico, during TICAL2019 and the 3rd Latin American Meeting of e-Science. We are talking about the dutchman Klaas Wierenga, our interviewee today. With good humor, Wierenga tells a little about the history of his famous development, comments on the plans for TICAL and reflects on how Europe and Latin America can collaborate even more efficiently.

The number of obese children and teenagers in the world has increased up to ten times in recent decades, according to a study led by the World Health Organization (WHO). By 2025, forecasts indicate that this number could reach 75 million people. The rate tends to grow in low- and middle-income countries, which points to the need for food-oriented policies and appropriate sports activities.