In 2017, the Brazilian Symposium on Computer Networks and Distributed Systems (SBRC), the largest event in Latin America's network area, returns to the North to celebrate its 35-year history. This is the second time that the event will be based in Belém (PA). The first was in 2007, the year of the inauguration of the Metropolitan Belém Network (Metrobel), within the scope of the Research and Education Community Networks Program (Redecomep). Check more details in the interview with the coordinator of SBRC 2017 and professor of the Department of Computer Science of the Federal University of Pará (UFPA), Antônio Jorge Abelém.

What are the main highlights of SBRC for this year?

Our purpose is to make an event covering different topics within the community of networks and distributed system. We invite relevant international speakers, as Renata Teixeira, Brazilian citizen, but lives in France as a researcher at the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique. Her lecture, available to the public of the WRNP (link is external), will focus on internet measurements (Internet Measurement). We can also mention the participation of Mario Gerla, of the University of California (UCLA), a renowned researcher in the area of autonomous networks and unmanned vehicle networks, and the Indian Zubair Shafiq, expert in network security.

In addition to the lectures, the SBRC offers the participants six mini-courses, eight workshops, among them the WRNP, and tutorials. Traditionally, we will have a board jointly to WRNP on Tuesday (May 16) on software-defined networks (SDN).

What is the importance of SBRC for its audience, researchers and students of computer networks?

The SBRC aims to select topics of great interest from the audience that is not yet contemplated in the university curricula because they are very young. We have accepted mini-courses that involve BigData analysis, experimental wireless networks, software-defined networks and the Internet of the Future.

The SBRC was consecrated as an event where there is this interaction among professionals in the area of networks. Often, these discussions begin in the academic context, but also achieve the market. This year, 77 scientific articles were submitted that deal with diverse topics, among them the studies guided to the Internet of the Future and SDN.

What does it mean for Para to receive the event for the second time?

The SBRC was a milestone not only for Belém, but for UFPA. After receiving the event in 2007, we started to be recognized as a research group in leading solutions in the area of networks. Soon after the SBRC in Belém, which brought together the second largest public in the history of the event, the launch of Metrobel, which brought a new level of quality of Internet services to connected institutions, including university hospitals, began to be part of the Telemedicine University Network (Rute). 

From then on, UFPA was the Brazilian coordinator of the Fiber project, approved in 2010 in the 1st Cooperation Program between Brazil and the European Union, which aimed to introduce an experimentation environment in Internet of the Future between European and Brazilian researchers. Completed in 2014, today the legacy is a testbed coordinated by RNP, the disposition of all that are interested in searching for new solutions of internet. Fibre allowed us to acquire great experience and led UFPA to be part of other projects, as Webscience, funded by CNPq, for the development of Future Internet Infrastructures.

In ten years, UFPA composed a large number of master's and Ph.D students, many of whom work as university professors and researchers abroad. Today, we have an impressive academic output and a very strong networking community, not just UFPA. I believe this will be expressed by the public that will participate in SBRC and WRNP this year.