Kingston, Jamaica -(JIS) – Minister of Commerce, Science and Technology, Phillip Paulwell has said that Jamaica was positioning itself as the leading Information and Communications Technology (ICT) destination in the region, including the Latin America grouping.
“This year, the World Information Technology Report has Jamaica at number three in the region in terms of E-readiness, in terms of the infrastructure and in terms of government policy. We are just behind Brazil and Chile, and I am making a prediction now that by next year this time, Jamaica is going to be number one in ICT in the region. I am saying this because there is tremendous political will and support and there is policy,” Minister Paulwell stressed.
The Minister was speaking at the opening of the 12th International Conference on ‘Logic for Programming and Automated Reasoning (LPAR-12)’, at the Wexford Court Hotel in Montego Bay, on Friday, December 2.
Mr. Paulwell said the Government was moving to ensure that the necessary infrastructure was available for the creation and development of a knowledge-based society, to enable every Jamaican to have access to broad-band technology, to be able to have speedier and cheaper access to the Internet.
“We believe that it is through this level of education and access to technology that we are going to empower our people with the infrastructure to be a part of this knowledge-based world. We further believe that our bread and butter lie in the brilliance and creativity of our people and through services, hence this focus,” Minister Paulwell emphasized.
Some 75 professors, computer specialists and researchers from universities across the world, are currently participating in the five-day conference.
Co-ordinator of the conference, Dr. Geoff Sutcliffe, noted that the conference was timely, as the computer field needed persons who could do in-depth analysis and repair work on complicated computer programming and accompanying challenges.
“The initial outcome of this conference will be the exchanging of ideas between participants, and everybody hopefully learning from each other. Part of our mission is to expose participants to cultural things. We hope to learn more of the Information Technology now taking Jamaica by storm, for them to know what’s going on here as well as in the wider Caribbean,” Dr. Sutcliffe told JIS News.
