Congress of the Brazilian Computer Society

I've attended the 2012 edition of the Congress of the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC) that run from July 16-19 in Curitiba, Parana. The conference was nice, except for the tragic death of  several students that were traveling by bus from Belem, Para in order to attend the Congress. For several moments, it was sad to think that these fellow students could be there learning and sharing experiences with us but, for reasons I cant explain, they were prevented to do so.

I had the opportunity to present my M.Sc research on correlating vertex attributes and community structure in attributed graphs at the Thesis and Dissertation Contest and I'm very honored that my work was selected as best M.Sc thesis of 2011. The other nine competitors presented really great research work on several topics, such as Software Engineering, Linked Data, Graph Theory, Grid Computing, Information Retrieval, and Optimization. In fact, I was not expecting that my thesis would be selected as the best one among so many interesting work. I think that my talk was very convincing, specially because I had practiced it a lot and also because I took several comments from my colleagues and advisor in order to improve it.   Another aspect that may have played a key role is that my M.Sc research goes from a general and intuitive problem to some cool theoretical and empirical results. As a consequence, I was able to catch the attention of the audience and the reviewers with a lot of cool examples, a little bit of math, some algorithmic techniques, and performance evaluations. Organizing a research project as a sequence of related research questions seems to be a powerful presentation strategy and I should keep employing it in the near future. I think this award is a good signal that I'm evolving as a researcher, which is a great motivation to keep working hard.

I also presented a recent work on detecting relevant content and influential users on Twitter at the first edition of the Brazilian Workshop on Social Network Mining. In this case, my presentation was terrible. I was tired because of the previous talk in the same day. Also, the slides were poor and I had not practiced the talk at all. Unfortunately, I went beyond the time limit, what makes things even worse. Nevertheless, our paper won the best paper award at the event (by my surprise again). That was my first best paper award and I'm very proud about it too. Now I'm working to turn those preliminary results into a full conference paper. The workshop was a lot of fun, specially because I had the opportunity to ask a lot of questions after the talks. I don't know why, but Brazilian researchers usually do not ask questions. I think this behavior is very disappointing. Questions indicate that the talk was relevant for the audience and have several benefits such as helping the presenter to improve his presentation skills and supporting more and better research. In particular, I think that questions are very important for students and young scientists.

The congress was a great opportunity to talk with several colleagues from UFMG and other universities as well. The conference dinner was really nice, though I've heard several complains about the event organization in general. 

My first impression of Curitiba was very positive. Different from my friends, I liked the weather (about 10 °C during the winter) and the people. Moreover, the transit and the public transport are much better than those of Belo Horizonte Metropolitan Area, where I live. I had a few hours to make a very fast bus tour around the city. The picture included in this post was took at the Tangua Park during the sunset.