Workshop on Brazil-EU cooperation in ICT Research and Development
Posted by on 16 November 2011 07:39
As partner in the BEMO-COFRA  project – one of the five selected projects for co-funding by the EC and Brazil under the Call FP7-ICT-2011-EU-Brazil – In-JeT was invited to a EU-Brazil workshop in Brasília on 7th November 2011. The workshop had two main objectives: 1) to celebrate the launching of the 1st Coordinated Call projects, and 2) to prepare the ground for the identification of topics for the 2nd Coordinated Call. The Brazilian State Secretary of Science, Technology and Innovation, Mr. Virgilio Almeida, and the Director for Emerging Technologies and Infrastructures of the Directorate General for Information Society and Media, EC, Mr. Mario Campolargo, gave the opening speeches. They both stressed the importance of the Brazil-EU cooperation and their hopes for future innovative joint projects that will create new technologies, new knowledge, and new business opportunities on both sides of the Atlantic.
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After the opening speeches, the project representatives from Europe and Brazil each received a certificate symbolising the recognition of the projects’ contribution to a fruitful Brazil-EU collaboration today and in the future. The rest of the morning session was dedicated to joint presentations of the five projects which were very different in terms of scope, aims and objectives.

In the afternoon session, the four topics for future joint collaboration were presented by other invited external experts. The four topics were: Cloud Computing Science, Sustainable technologies for Smart Cities, Smart platforms for a smarter society, and Hybrid Broadcast-Broadband TV applications and services. The presentations were followed by a long and quite intense discussion in order to further refine the definition of the topics. This was an important exercise because it actually allowed the workshop participants to not only validate but also influence the wording of the topics and their scope for the 2nd Coordinated Call which were to be formally agreed upon by EU and Brazilian officials the following day.

BEMO-COFRA was represented by Djamel Sadok (UPFE), Markus Taumberger (VTT) and Trine F. Sørensen (In-JeT). The workshop had around 60 participants representing companies and universities from different EU countries and different states in Brazil as well as representatives from the Brazilian Ministry of External Relation and the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation.