Karim: T&T needs foundation for knowledge-based economy

Local students will be afforded the opportunity by year’s end to assist scientists from NASA Ames Research Centre, US research institutes and the Institute of Marine Affairs in studying carbon dynamics in coral reefs and seagrasses in Tobago coastal waters. This is one of the benefits to be derived for students, following a visit by chief technical officer of IT at NASA Ames Research Centre Ray O’Brien, who was listed as the key international speaker at the Caribbean Open Data Conference hosted by the Faculty of Engineering, University of the West Indies, St Augustine, on January 26 and 27. O’Brien was sponsored by the National Institute of Higher Education, Research, Science and Technology (Niherst).

Marked as the first in the region, the conference was spearheaded by Dr Kim Mallalieu, a senior lecturer and the leader of communication systems in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The aim of the conference was to raise awareness of the strategic role that open data can play in the design and development of software solutions to address problems in the region—in agriculture, fisheries, regional trade, tourism, and ICT access. O’Brien delivered presentations: “Open NASA and the US Open Government Initiative,” giving an account of NASA’s experience with open data and insights into well-established open data facilities and open data. Open data refers to non-personal data that is made freely available to the public for re-use without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control.

Tertiary Education Minister Fazal Karim who brought the curtain down on the conference has viewed the collaboration with global centres of excellence as critical to achieving major goals of his ministry. Karim insisted that T&T needed to establish a solid foundation for a knowledge-based economy, which encompasses developing an innovative, highly trained and skilled workforce and the ICT infrastructure to support education and training, research and development, business and Government, among an array of services. He noted that T&T would soon become the first intelligent island in the hemisphere. In welcoming the development of partnerships between Niherst and leading world-class scientific organisations like NASA to augment and accelerate national capacity-building efforts in ICT, Karim was keen about co-creation which the Partnership will support.

Karim explained that O’Brien’s visit will be one of several areas of collaboration initiated between the institute and NASA following the visit in 2011 of Trinidad-born NASA aerospace engineer, Camille Wardrop Alleyne for Niherst’s tenth Caribbean Youth Science Forum (CYSF) and the historic live hook-up to the International Space Station. In December, local students,  Karim revealed, will have the opportunity to assist scientists from NASA Ames Research Centre, among other US research institutes, and the Institute of Marine Affairs in studying carbon dynamics in coral reefs and seagrasses in Tobago coastal waters.

About o’brien

In his current role at NASA, O’Brien is involved in the implementation of NASA’s Open Government plan, promoting open data sharing and open source code development. Prior to this, he was the project manager for NASA’s Nebula Cloud Computing Initiative. During his tenure, Nebula’s Nova compute controller technology was chosen as one of the two foundational components of OpenStack—the Open Source Cloud Computing Initiative. Since its formation in 2010, OpenStack has become one of the world’s fastest growing community software development projects.