Sociedade Brasileira de Computação (SBC)

Zusammenfassung

The Brazilian Computer Society was founded in July 1978 in Porto Alegre, at the first meeting of what became the annual CSBC (Congresso da Sociedade Brasileira de Computação) — a conference that has been running for over forty years and is the largest CS research gathering in Latin America. The SBC emerged during Brazil’s military government era, when the regime was pursuing an aggressive “market reserve” policy for domestic computing that isolated Brazil from international technology for fifteen years. The society navigated this politically complex environment to build a research community, establish curriculum standards for CS education, and ultimately provide the institutional infrastructure for Brazil’s emergence as one of the world’s largest computing education and research producers.

Brazil’s Computing Context in 1978

Brazil in 1978 was a military dictatorship entering its fourteenth year in power, pursuing a development strategy that combined state-directed industrialization with aggressive protection of strategic sectors. Computing had been classified as strategic in the early 1970s, and the “Special Secretariat for Informatics” (SEI) oversaw a market reserve policy (política de informática) that prohibited the import of foreign minicomputers and later microcomputers for domestic use.

The rationale was familiar in developing world industrial policy: protecting an infant domestic computing industry to allow it to grow to competitive capability before facing international competition. The practical effect: Brazilian companies — Cobra, Sisco, Edisa, Labo, and others — produced domestically designed or assembled computers for the Brazilian market, but these were technically inferior to contemporary American and Japanese products. Brazilian computer users — including universities — worked with older or less capable technology than contemporaries elsewhere.

The SBC’s founding in this environment was an act of scientific community building under constraint. Brazilian computing researchers, concentrated at a handful of universities (USP in São Paulo, UNICAMP in Campinas, PUC-Rio in Rio de Janeiro, UFRGS in Porto Alegre, UFMG in Belo Horizonte), needed professional coordination and a publication venue regardless of the hardware they were using.

Founding: Porto Alegre, July 1978

The SBC was established at the first CSBC (Congresso da Sociedade Brasileira de Computação) in Porto Alegre in July 1978. The founding group came primarily from the computing science departments of Brazilian universities, particularly those with the strongest existing research programs.

UFRGS (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul) in Porto Alegre hosted the founding congress, and the university’s computing department remained one of SBC’s institutional anchors. The choice of Porto Alegre rather than São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro for the founding meeting reflected the federal character of Brazilian academia and the willingness to distribute leadership among institutions.

The founding figures were the professors who had built Brazil’s early CS departments, in many cases having completed doctoral work in the United States or Europe in the late 1960s and early 1970s and returned to build Brazilian CS programs. This generation — trained internationally but committed to Brazilian institution-building — shaped the SBC’s orientation: internationally connected, research-quality, but rooted in Brazilian higher education.

The Market Reserve Era and SBC

The market reserve policy created unusual constraints for SBC’s first decade. Brazilian universities could not easily import foreign computers, which meant Brazilian computing research was conducted on Brazilian-made machines that were significantly behind the international frontier. Papers presented at CSBC in the early 1980s sometimes reflected hardware limitations that their authors had to navigate rather than transcend.

The SBC’s response was characteristic of research communities operating under constraint: focus on areas where hardware limitations mattered less. Theoretical computer science — algorithms, complexity theory, formal language theory — could advance without state-of-the-art hardware. Programming languages research and software engineering required less hardware than, say, graphics or systems research. Brazilian computing research in this era developed strengths in theoretical and software areas partly because those were accessible given the hardware constraints.

The policy ended in 1992, when Brazil’s new democratic government opened the computing market to foreign imports. The influx of competitive hardware — immediately providing Brazilian researchers access to workstations and personal computers comparable to international counterparts — transformed Brazilian computing research capability rapidly.

SBC’s Conferences: The CSBC Ecosystem

The SBC’s most visible function is organizing Brazil’s computing research conference ecosystem. The annual CSBC serves as an umbrella under which specialized symposia are co-located:

CSBC (Congresso da Sociedade Brasileira de Computação): The annual congress, the largest computing research event in Latin America. CSBC 2024 attracted thousands of attendees and dozens of co-located events.

SBRC (Simpósio Brasileiro de Redes de Computadores e Sistemas Distribuídos): The Brazilian networking and distributed systems research conference, one of the most active SBC symposia. Brazil’s strong internet infrastructure engineering community makes networking research particularly active.

SBES (Simpósio Brasileiro de Engenharia de Software): Software engineering research, reflecting Brazil’s large software industry workforce.

SBBD (Simpósio Brasileiro de Banco de Dados): Database systems research.

IHC (Simpósio Brasileiro sobre Fatores Humanos em Sistemas Computacionais): Human factors in computing, Brazil’s HCI research conference.

CBSec (Congresso Brasileiro de Cibersegurança): Cybersecurity research, a recent addition reflecting the growth of Brazil’s digital infrastructure and cybersecurity incidents.

The co-location of specialized symposia under the CSBC umbrella is a deliberate SBC strategy to maximize attendance and cross-community interaction — researchers in different areas who might not attend each other’s specialized conferences encounter each other at CSBC.

SBC and CS Education

The SBC has been actively involved in defining CS curricula for Brazilian higher education. Brazil’s federal university system (with its hundreds of universities organized under the Ministry of Education) requires curriculum frameworks for degree programs, and the SBC has contributed curriculum recommendations that have influenced the entire Brazilian CS education system.

SBC’s Reference Curricula (Currículo de Referência): The SBC has published reference curriculum documents for Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, and Software Engineering degree programs. These documents, while not legally binding, carry significant weight because the SBC’s endorsement matters to accreditation processes.

The SBC also engages with secondary school computing education, advocating for computational thinking in the Brazilian national curriculum and developing programming education materials.

International Connections

The SBC is Brazil’s IFIP member society, providing formal international connections. The SBC’s relationship with ACM and IEEE Computer Society is primarily through individual researcher memberships and conference attendance rather than organizational partnership — many Brazilian CS researchers hold ACM memberships and publish in ACM venues.

Latin American connections: The SBC has been an influential model for computing societies in other Latin American countries, and participates in a broader regional computing science community. The Clei (Centro Latinoamericano de Estudios en Informática) organizes the CLEI congress as a regional Latin American computing event, with SBC participation.

SBC Awards

Prêmio SBC: Awards for outstanding contributions to computing in Brazil, covering research, teaching, and public service categories.

SBC Fellow: Fellowship designation for sustained distinguished contribution to Brazilian computing.

Dissertações e Teses Destacadas: Annual recognition of outstanding masters dissertations and doctoral theses in computing.

Modern SBC

The SBC has roughly 6,000 active members as of the 2020s, reflecting Brazil’s large computing education system and the expanding software industry. Brazil’s technology sector has grown significantly: companies like Totvs (enterprise software), CI&T, and a growing fintech sector (Nubank, PicPay, Mercado Pago) provide employment for computing graduates and constitute a computing industry whose interests the SBC represents.

The challenges facing SBC are a scaled-up version of those facing national computing societies generally: maintaining engagement from an increasingly dispersed professional community, remaining relevant to research communities that operate primarily in international venues, and serving both academic and practitioner members with different needs and interests.

Brazil’s computing research output has grown substantially — Brazilian universities appear regularly in international rankings and Brazilian researchers publish in top ACM and IEEE venues. This internationalization of Brazilian computing research both validates the SBC’s decades of institution-building and creates competitive pressure on national community activities.