critical in today’s information age, to make information and knowledge accessible to all.

CICAD’s cooperation that began in 1999 with the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) continued and expanded in 2000. Two CICAD/NSF workshops held in 1999 in Orlando, Florida and Manzanillo, Mexico resulted in the conceptual model and pilot project Americas Multilateral Information Grid Alliance (AMIGA).  This project was approved by the Commission at its twenty-sixth regular session (Montevideo, Uruguay, October 1999).  In 2000, two workshops were held in Argentina and Chile in May/June 2000, which brought together a total of over eighty scientists and researchers from the United States, Argentina and Chile.  Both opened the possibility that CICAD can work with scientists from all three countries to initiate and/or to join research projects in advanced information technologies with concrete applications in facilitating and automating the dissemination, collection and classification of drug-related data and information. 

Two specific cooperation projects were developed within the framework of AMIGA. The first project, with the Government of Colombia, is a pilot project in multilingual translation that will develop automated machine translation between Spanish and Siona.  Siona belongs to the linguistic family of Tukano Occidental, which is spoken in the Colombian states of Putumayo and Caquetá, as well as in the Amazon territories of Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela and Brazil. The NSF pledge in Montevideo of up to one million dollars for the research needed for the multilingual translation software, an initial step of the pilot project, has already been activated.

A second cooperative endeavor between CICAD and NSF financed the travel and per diem of two Western Hemisphere researchers to a workshop organized by Sandia Laboratories in San Diego, California on July 27-28, 2000. The workshop, entitled Data Mining of Multidimensional Sources of Data for Discovery of Global Public Health Incidents and Events (Natural and Man-made in Origin), examined indicators for predicting medical and social epidemics, and a potential application to forecasting outbreaks of consumption for specific drugs.