Los Libertadores
Inspired by the famous liberators who changed the face of Latin American history, this initiative is a “common thread” effort that links all of ISTEC’s goals and objectives. It seeks to create a flexible network of telecommunication services (a hemispheric backbone for academic and R&D purposes), computing facilities, and teaching stations, known collectively as “Centers of Excellence”. Each country or region identifies their needs, and then customizes a Center of Excellence to address them. The Center brings together agents from the private and public sectors, research laboratories, and international organizations to work together and find solutions to the problems of interest. Since those problems invariably have multiple facets, the solutions must involve multiple disciplines and diverse contributions available from each sector.

To date, legislation has been passed in two countries to establish the legal framework for creation of Centers, and ISTEC is actively working with several governments, international funding agencies, and professional organizations to highlight the importance and critical nature of this effort in the development of the nations in Ibero-America. Progress is being made toward the creation of other Centers in the region, and as those Centers are developed they will be linked with the existing ones to form a powerful resource for addressing problems of the region. For example, ISTEC and two Brazilian universities, the University of São Paulo (USP) and the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) are assuming a leadership position in microelectronics education and research and development in the hemisphere. These universities are in the process of establishing an advanced semiconductor processing capability, on a par with the most advanced educational installations in the world. The two universities plan to build a new facility in which they will consolidate all their sub-micron capable equipment.

In other cases, the Center may not be a central building, but rather a network of capabilities distributed throughout an area. The resources available through these centers include state-of-the-art information and education, consulting services, computational capabilities, and worldwide access to expertise as needed. The Los Libertadores Initiative calls for the creation of a comprehensive hemispheric telecommunications backbone, such as Internet 2, Next Generation Internet (NGI), or the vBNS backbones in the United States.

Currently, ISTEC has conceived an IT infrastructure that will provide members with a multilingual, easily accessible and well-organized web-based system to offer electronic services to all members. The proposed programs within the IT infrastructure include the creation of the Science and Technology Education Portal (STEP) and the ISTEC Distributed Database (BDDIS). Some of the objectives of this Portal include the creation of a real-time forum for discussion on important topics, such as S&T policies, IP protection, development of hardware and software industries in Iberoamerican countries, and ethical guidelines to help support the transfer of technology. It will also provide members with relevant updated information and statistics, offer a conduit for intellectual creativity, provide access to a free flow of information and pre-competitive research, and provide a means to exchange this information in order to avoid duplicated efforts.

The distributed database will create an information culture within the Consortium to encourage its proper use as a depository of experiences, documents, and information to be exchanged among the scientific community. Thus, BDDIS will create, structure, store, maintain, and query all the relevant information and statistics of science and technology in the region. Through these web-based mechanisms, the Consortium will provide an effective link between existing members and initiatives with a user-friendly interface.

In addition, ISTEC has developed cooperation strategies with the Organization of American States (OAS), the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), United Nations Education, Science and Culture Organization (UNESCO), United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC.) The common goals are to develop human capital, emphasizing the involvement of both public and private institutions that implement training, research, and academic exchanges in science and technology within the region.

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