Carolina Cosse, Minister of Industry, Energy and Mining, Juan Cristina, dean of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of the Republic (Udelar), and Leonardo Loureiro, president of the Uruguayan Chamber of Information Technology (Cuti), were the speakers at the activity called "Science and technology in the future development of Uruguay", an event framed in the Day of the Future that took place on Tuesday in the daily and organized by the Uruguayan Association of Graduates in Development.
As a trigger for the conference, the moderator Martina Lejtreger cited the paradigm of the Sábato triangle, a model of scientific-technological policy devised by the Argentine physicist Jorge Sábato -brother cousin of the writer Ernesto- which establishes that for a scientific and technological system to really exist, there must be a strong and permanent interaction between the State, the scientific-technological infrastructure and the productive sector.
First of all, Loureiro questioned this paradigm and affirmed that, according to his criteria, civil society is also part of the innovation system, so the most accurate figure to graph this idea is a rhombus. He affirmed that his sector is very particular, "because we are the biggest consumers of innovation projects of the National Agency for Research and Innovation". The president of CUTI added that the link between his sector and the academy is so strong that in the past they carried out "a joint venture with Udelar with the Software Testing Center". On the other hand, he focused on decentralization. He affirmed that his sector wants "people to be happy". "We want to take the development center of the companies to the whole country. The academy has decentralized, but the industry still has a long way to go" in that regard, he said.
For his part, Juan Cristina began by raising the idea of what science is and the task it carries out. "There is an image in society of what science is that has been transmitted by the media," he said, and gave as an example the movies in which the scientist is bad and wants to dominate the world, which is saved by James Bond. For the dean of Science, we must work to reverse this image of science.
Regarding Uruguay's objective situation, Cristina stated that "in the 21st century it is difficult for a country to survive being only a financial center or a producer of raw materials. Today the world is global and exponential. A single innovation leaves us out of the market". He also recalled that "reality is leading us to a world in which by 2034 it is thought that more than half of the jobs will be automated. Hence the importance of science in the education of the citizens of the 21st century".
Minister Cosse was the last speaker of the event. In one of her first speeches she said that in the field of innovation and science "Uruguay has enormous opportunities for many reasons: being a country of three million inhabitants and with political will and direction, in a decade it has been possible to lift many people out of poverty, change the energy matrix and reform the health system". "It is time to look further ahead, and we have shown that we have the muscle that allows us to make changes," she said. She added that "innovation should not depend on an institutional framework but on a structure, and innovation has to depend on research and development. Without research and development there is no innovation possible, even if that R&D [research and development] doesn't have anything directly to do with technology.
Cosse said that the conditions are in place to define a clear path for Uruguay to become a country of science education. "The country that I imagine is defined as one that orients its education towards science," he said, although he clarified that this does not imply minimizing human training. "Instead of dwelling on administrative details of education, we should make efforts towards defining science education," he said.
The minister added that four areas were defined to be promoted - design, biotechnology, creative industries and data management - and that it is essential to educate people "not so that they learn a technology, but so that they are prepared for the changes". In addition, Cosse said he thinks it is unfair that although 80% of scientific knowledge is generated at Udelar, it is not known by the rest of society. "I think we have an important area to work on," he said.
Source: La Diaria
Connect