Today, I learned that:

The Brazilian-Swedish seminar I attended earlier this week, see my post of 2016-05-18 , was in fact the fifth of the same type that SACF (Swedish Academic Collaboration Forum) arranged. Earlier, it had been hosted in Korea, Singapore, China, and Indonesia, all with the aim to promote the exchange of ideas and opinions in academic matters and scientific research. In February, 2017, there is planned another event, where the participating countries of these five seminars will gather in Stockholm, Sweden, for a follow-up.

Today, I will concentrate on the seminar in Brazil and hope to be able to comment on the earlier four on a later occasion. The two days in Brasília were packed with interesting presentations and networking opportunities. And the earlier weeks of commotion in the federal capital could not be seen here, on the contrary. There were many positive and inspiring comments on what happens when Brazilians and Swedes join forces in advancing the frontiers of science.

Basically, there were four kinds of seminars in one:

• Top level management sessions, where the most prominent representatives from the Brazilian and Swedish universities discussed “Internationalisation and Collaboration in Higher Education”, “Funding for promoting world class research collaboration”, and “Brazil-Sweden: Importance of University & Industry collaboration”.
• 5 different series of academic sessions, namely “Imaging and Visualization in Life Science”, “Novel Functional Materials and Nanotechnology” (2 parallel sessions due to the number of topics presented),”Inclusive Education: Gender & Ethnicity”, “Sustainable Development: Energy, Environment and Biodiversity”, and “Machine Intelligence and Autonomy” (also 2 parallel sessions due to the number of topics presented).
• A funding seminar, where funding agencies and universities interchanged ideas and suggestions about various aspects of funding of scientific research.
• An innovation seminar, where the Swedish innovation agency Vinnova presented programs for funding and gave various examples of successful Swedish-Brazilian projects.

I decided to dedicate my time of the academic sessions to learn more about new materials and nanotechnology, to follow up the knowledge I had acquired through the MOOC about graphene in 2015, see also my post of 2016-02-01. Below are some pictures I took of the event.

I wish to extend my sincere gratitude for inviting me, to the organizers of this extra ordinary seminar with so many brilliant minds gathered in one place, Gustaf Cars (Uppsala University), Helena Balogh (Linköping University), and Åsa Valadi (Chalmers University of Technology)!

Update 2016-05-29:

On the web site of CAPES, there is further information, with photos, of the two days of seminar. Please consult references #2 and 3 below.

Finally, I just learned that the mysterious first chord of the Beatles song from 1964,”A hard day’s night”, in fact are three different chords, played by George Harrison, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, joined into one. That is what I call a perfect cooperation project! Reference #1 below, in Portuguese, presents all the facts behind this Magical Mystery Chord, with images and video clips.

… That’s what I learned in school !

Refs.:

1: Um acorde mágico dos Beatles revelado depois de 52 anos de mistério

2: Capes recebe Seminário de Excelência Brasil-Suécia

3: Brasil e Suécia pretendem intensificar cooperação científica entre os dois países

+: What did you learn in school today ?