The conference I went to was the annual congress of Brazilian Computer Science society (Sociedade Brasileira do Computação – SBC), which took place at Unisinos (abbreviation for “Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos”), located at São Leopoldo about an hour away from Porto Alegre. As it turned out, São Leopoldo was too small to host all the attendees, so the guests were invited to stay at hotels near Porto Alegre airport and were bussed from there (50 minutes each way), which was a bit of a hassle.

Unisinos is an example of a good private university in Brazil, with some kind of religious past. As I understand, Brazilian universities basically fall into three times: public (good), Catholic (good) and for-profit private (bad), so in that classification Unisinos would go under “Catholic.” It has a campus that looks modern without being ugly, with tangerine trees and tangerines on the ground. It also has some scary creatures crawling on the ground – a reminder that you gotta look where you step in South America. (The link takes you to a picture of scary communitarian caterpillars – don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

The congress itself was really a collection of largely independent events occuring in parallel, e.g. there was a meeting by the Brazilian AI researchers, another one dedicated to government support for informatics, another one for dedicated to computer science education, etc. I spent most of my time at the workshop on government policy. The conference was all in portugues so some of the content was lost on me. I found that I could understand some talks completely and others not at all (except for the slides). Being at an all-portuguese event also made it somewhat hard to meet people, but I did manage to meet some.