Registration for the 3rd Brazil-European Union Call in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has already been closed and the electronic systems that receive proposals registered 42 submissions, of which 38 were considered eligible. From that amount, five projects will be selected: one in High Performance Computing, another in Experimental Platforms and three in Cloud Computing.

This call is a great opportunity to explore the potential of Brazilian and European institutions in the search for solutions that translate into benefits for the ICT market and for society. The 42 proposals involve the participation of 196 institutions in Europe and 150 in Brazil. There are, on average, eight institutions collaborating in each project proposal. "These figures show the great capacity for cooperation among various institutions of the two communities and emphasize the sharing of information and scientific and technological knowledge, skilled human resources and R&D infrastructure," said the CTIC Projects Coordinator Wanderson Paim.

In Brazil, the initiative is coordinated by the Computing Policies Secretariat (Sepin) of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI) and the RNP, through its Research and Development Center in Information and Communication Technologies (CTIC).

Next steps

Evaluators will have the month of May to perform the analysis process. After this stage, all Brazilian and European evaluators, as well as some representatives of MCTI and RNP, will participate in a meeting to choose the selected projects, between June 22 and 25, at the European Commission headquarters in Brussels. Representatives of the European Commission and the Brazilian government (MCTI) will participate in a panel to celebrate the cooperation agreement and submit the list of selected projects at the end of the meeting on the 25th.

"The expectation is that after the selection we will able to contract five of the selected projects still in 2015. In turn, the start of the projects execution may occur at the end of the year, or, at the latest in early 2016," said Paim. The rule in this case is that the projects start on the same day on the Brazilian and European area, in order to synchronize the funding and the activities of the teams of each area.