Universidade Federal do Amazonas

The Universidade Federal do Amazonas (UFAM) was founded in 1909 and during the last 100 years has been one of the most important local institutions for the development of the Amazonas state. It's located in the north of Brazil, right in the middle of the Amazon rain forest.

The University has a main campus in the city of Manaus, and facilities in four other locations: a south campus in Itacoatiara; a west campus in Benjamin Constant, near the border with Peru and Colombia, an east campus in Parintins , an island in the Amazon river; and a south campus in Humaitá. The university offers 109 undergraduate courses in many areas (architecture, business, medicine, law, pharmacy, nursing, social work, dentistry, engineering, computing, physics, mathematics, biology, ecology, biotechnology, among many others) and 40 graduate courses.

The Institute of Computing (IComp) is the main unit at UFAM dedicated to education and research in Computer Science. The institute is committed with a research-oriented, hands-on approach to education, providing students with opportunities to participate in research and development projects, in many cases with industrial partners, and to engage in entrepreneurial ventures. Currently, IComp has a faculty of 33 full-time PhDs, and about 700 students enrolled in undergraduate and graduate programs. In addition, IComp yearly supplies over 30 minor courses to several other programs at UFAM.

The Institute offers two bachelor degree programs: Computer Science, with about 250 students currently enrolled, and Software Engineering, with about 300 students currently enrolled. The two programs have recently received the status of excellent from the Brazilian Ministry of Education, earning grades 5 and 4 (out of 5), respectively, in the 2014 nationwide undergraduate superior education evaluation. In particular, the Computer Science program was ranked as the second best in this evaluation, and the best one among the Federal Universities. IComp and UFAM continuously seek for cooperation with partners in Brazil and abroad to strengthen their scientific profile and to offer richer and valuable research experiences to their researchers and students.

Role in ATMOSPHERE

The researchers participating in ATMOSPHERE are from the Database and Information Retrieval Group (BDRI), and have made strong contributions to the areas of data management, information retrieval and data mining applied to the context of the World-Wide Web in the past years.

This is evidenced not only by the research articles published in high quality venues, but also by the software prototypes built in their own labs, the technical cooperation they maintain with private companies, and entrepreneurship initiatives they create and through which they convert research results into economic and social development.

The group is composed of researchers with a strong academic background in these areas, and focuses its research efforts on providing cutting-edge technologies for a number of web applications. The complementary expertise of the researchers has led to the development of interdisciplinary work related to these three areas and assigns the group a singular profile and a solid basis for presenting high impact solutions to practical problems in the several research topics addressed within the group.