INCOBRA - Increasing International Science, Technology and Innovation Cooperation between Brazil and the European Union

In recent years, Brazil and the European Union (EU) have narrowed cooperation in science, technology and innovation (ST & I) with the launch set of coordinated calls for advanced research projects and development (R & D) in the area of information and communication technologies (ICT). Until now, each party has allocated about 17 million in three calls, aiming to encourage partnerships between Brazilian and European technology scientific institutions.

Preliminary results of projects selected in the 3rd Call Coordinated EU-Brazil, opened in 2015, and information on the release of the fourth call, were presented on Tuesday (20), in Brasília (DF) during the ICT Week event promoted in the framework of international cooperation EU-Brazil Sectoral Dialogues. According to the responsible for the coordinated calls in Brazil and the European Union, it is expected that the 4th EU-Brazil Coordinated Call is launched later this year, with each side contributing with 8 million euros.

According with Lisandro Granville, director of the Center for Research and Development in Digital Technologies for Information and Communication (CTIC) from the National Network of Education and Research (RNP) – institution responsible for the call in Brazil - the fourth call will focus on projects of Internet of Things (IoT), 5G internet and cloud computing.

For cloud computing projects, the Brazilian government will provide EUR 2.5 million. In IoT, there will be an investment of 4.5 million and for internet 5G the funding of 1 million euros. The amounts may vary depending on how the projects will be made. The preliminary calendar indicates that registrations must be made until March 2017, with projects hired up to December 2017. The R&D projects approved will have a maximum duration of three years.

Benefits and challenges

For the director from RNP, the fact that Brazilian and European researchers interact directly in research projects help in the capacity building of qualified human resources for both parties, and contributes to the creation of international research networks. He also points out that some difficulties were diagnosed especially in regard to technical differences between researchers, which has been a major challenge.

For the Counselor of the EU Delegation in Brazil, Augusto Albuquerque, the fact that the fourth call is scheduled to launched, underlined Brazil from other countries that have not passed from the second Call and shows the success of this EU-BR cooperation.

Significant Results

The third call selected five projects in 2015. They started earlier this year and are expected to end in 2018.

The researches are aligned into three categories: high-performance processing; cloud computing; and experimental platforms. The five projects put together 49 institutions, 23 from Brazil and 26 from Europe. Altogether, there are 24 universities, 17 companies and eight research centers. Click here to see more details about the selected projects.

One of the projects is the EUBra-BigSea, which has as main objective to create a sustainable international cooperation in the Big Data cloud computing. The project that counts with support of Spain, Italy, Portugal and United Kingdom, foresees technology transfer for real cases. For instance to use cloud data in smart cities. According with the representative of the project, Dorgival Guedes, the team work with foreign researchers shows to be very fruitful.

Another project, called High Performance Computing for Energy (HPC4E), seeks to apply high-performance processing technologies in the study of renewable energy. This includes new techniques in the generation of wind energy, efficient combustion systems for biomass fuels and exploration geophysics to hydrocarbon reservoirs.

In the third call, the submission of proposals was open to reserachers and professionals in engineering, computing, software, communications and computer networks, researchers and experts from educational and research institutions, and organizations with expertise in the areas covered. Propositions submitted totaled 55 projects from national and multinational companies, especially HP, IBM, Intel and Petrobras.

(Leandro Cipriano, da Agência Gestão CT&I)