Research and training activities for human resources have been carried out for 21 years at the graduate level, involving the formulation and solution of direct and inverse problems for application in Engineering, Biotechnology and the Environment, under the coordination of the proponent of the project entitled Computational Modeling for Applications in Engineering and Environment, involving a high number of students, recent doctors and professors. These activities are directly linked to the Research Lines of the Graduate Program in Computational Modeling entitled: 1) Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computing; and ii) Thermofluidodynamics. From 2007 to 2017, international cooperation projects started and grew significantly, in the context of inverse problems, with the use of Computational Intelligence, leading to the publication of 2 books, 6 chapters, 24 full articles in journals and 30 full articles in scientific events, in addition to training human resources in Brazil and abroad.

The international partnership project here in question aims to develop computational modeling, simulation and experimentation, based on Inverse Problems and Computational Modeling. Theoretical / analytical, numerical and experimental activities are developed in three main areas of activity: i) Heat Transfer; ii) Transport / Mass Transfer; and iii) Identification of Data and Failures in Industrial Systems. It also aims to contribute to the institutional project of internationalization of the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), strengthening solid partnerships with the Technological University of Havana José Antonio Echeverría in the period from 2007 to 2017, as well as expanding the scope of the project with the participation of the University of Granada, Spain. There is, therefore, a trilateral international cooperation project: Brazil, Spain, Cuba, to be carried out between 2018 and 2022.

The relevance of the research area addressed here is indisputable, having numerous relevant applications in Engineering, Biotechnology and Environment, just to name a few among many areas of human activity. Brazil has a prominent position on the international scene in the area of ​​inverse problems, and one of the strongest research groups in the country operates at the Polytechnic Institute of UERJ, under the coordination of the proponent of this international cooperation research project. Several formulations and different methods of solution have been proposed by this research group, for more than 20 years, in partnerships with colleagues from different institutions in the country and abroad, so that the project proposed here consolidates the already existing partnerships.