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Check out the voice of the Executive Director of the University Corporation for Internet Development, CUDI (Mexico), and his vision about RedCLARA and collaboration. Read this and other interviews in the book "Name, voice and instrument of collaboration in Latin America”.

What comes to your mind when you hear a researcher talking about collaboration?
Today research is no longer conducted by a researcher isolated in his/her workstation, as productive research is necessarily conducted by means of multidisciplinary scientific teams and, in many occasions, located in different institutions. Collaboration is a necessary condition for modern research.

What would you say is the most important aspect of research and education networks?
Research and education networks make it possible to carry out the modern research in which multidisciplinary teams that are geographically distributed take part.

How would you describe the role of RedCLARA both at a regional and global level?
RedCLARA has made it possible to have an advanced network in Latin America to support collaboration, research and teaching in our countries and in the rest of the world. Furthermore, it has incorporated us into a worldwide community of advanced networks, which is crucial to globalise our education and research institutions.

What has been the key important aspect of the ALICE2 project for your network?
The ALICE2 project has enabled CUDI, on the one hand, to have a better connectivity towards our peers in Latin America and Europe and, on the other, the creation of a human group in most of the countries in our region, driven by similar concerns, which has become fundamental to do collaborative research and to show the benefits of globalisation in higher education activities.

How important is for CUDI the collaboration with other national and regional networks and how do you collaborate globally?
Today higher education needs to take a global approach. Mexican universities are invariably making efforts to join globalisation and increase collaboration with other institutions in the region and the world. Connectivity is a fundamental tool to do so.

If RedCLARA did not exist, what would the science, research and innovation scenario in your country be like?
RedCLARA has been decisive for our universities to be able to have a global approach. Without these collaborations, Mexico’s higher education would be severely limited.

Could you describe your view of research and education networks in the future?
Research and education networks will continue playing a fundamental role to make university connectivity and inter-institutional collaboration more effective, not only between universities in the same country but between universities located anywhere in the world.

In a not very distant future, networks will not only offer basic connectivity services. They will be able to offer computer services with global scale economies. Services like cloud computing, supercomputing grids, federated identification, videoconferences with the global community of scientists and large bandwidth connectivity with scientific instruments which are increasingly more complex and fundamental for modern science.

According to your point of view, what should be the role of RedCLARA over the next five years?
RedCLARA’s fundamental role over the next five years must be to ensure the existence of a high-capacity regional network which guarantees Latin America’s institutions the possibility of collaborating, participating in joint research projects and obtaining computer services over the network in conditions that can be compared to those available for universities in the world’s most developed countries.