The proposed exchange programme will allow us to strengthen the infrastructure of intellectual exchange between the EU (UK, Netherlands and Spain) and China. The short-term transfer of academic staff will facilitate the mutual exchange of domain specific knowledge and know-how, and by means of seminars and workshops, we intend to widen the scope of the programme, including as many (self-supported) external participants as possible, both from academia and industry. We place special emphasis on the development of early career researchers to allow PhD students to gain international experience by working with some of the world-leading research groups in the field. We intend to achieve the objectives of our exchange programme by jointly working on a series of research topics that have been chosen specifically to maximise the synergy between the partners. The overall research theme is nature inspired computation and its applications: The field of nature-inspired computation is a relatively new inter-disciplinary area of research that is concerned with the computational capabilities of natural systems and their interpretation in a computational framework. Each of the seven participants (3 in the EU and 4 in China) has dedicated research groups that are amongst the world's best in this highly relevant field of research. Each institute provides at least one leading researcher as a representative, with a total of twelve distinguished academics across all participants. The individual research efforts across all members are highly complimentary to one another and may be combined efficiently to widen our knowledge base. The collaboration is expected to generate high-impact research outcomes in the form of publications, seminars and workshops. The strengthening of the relationships between the EU and China will set the stage for long-term collaborations in the future and will provide the ERA with better access to the rapidly growing Chinese academic and industrial sectors.