\nField of expertise<\/strong>
\nAlgorithms, information retrieval, and artificial intelligence
\nInstitution<\/strong>
\nFederal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG)
\nEducational background<\/strong>
\nBachelor\u2019s degree in mechanical engineering, UFMG (1971); master\u2019s degree in computer science, Pontifical Catholic University, Rio de Janeiro (1976); PhD in computer science, University of Waterloo, Canada (1982)
\nPublished works<\/strong>
\n44 articles in scientific journals; 14 books (8 as coauthor); 121 papers published in conference proceedings<\/div>\n
You had a dramatic experience during childhood. How did this affect you?<\/strong> But although a trained mechanical engineer, you spent your entire career as a computer scientist. Why so?<\/strong> What was it like working with computing at a time when there were only a handful of computers in Brazil?<\/strong> Were you then already considering an academic career?<\/strong> In what way?<\/strong> Part of the money that Victor Ribeiro and I earned from the sale of our first startup was donated to UFMG<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This was one of Brazil\u2019s pioneering undergraduate programs in computer science.<\/strong> What is your assessment of computer science programs today in Brazil?<\/strong> When did you earn your PhD?<\/strong> What are your chief interests in computing?<\/strong> A number of search engines emerged in the 1990s and 2000s.<\/strong> Akwan developed strong R&D capabilities and cutting-edge technology through collaboration with a world-class research group at the university<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So when you returned to Brazil, you were already infected… <\/strong> Was it a search engine?<\/strong> In other words, he envisaged a search engine specifically for books.<\/strong> How did this engine become your first startup?<\/strong> How much did they invest?<\/strong> In 2011 UFMG implemented a framework that facilitates technology transfer to startups<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Is it true that part of the proceeds from the sale of Miner were donated to UFMG?<\/strong> What was the money used for?<\/strong> Soon after selling Miner, you created another startup that was later sold to Google. Could you tell us more about this venture?<\/strong> Could you describe Akwan\u2019s business model?<\/strong> So Akwan was a spin-off from UFMG?<\/strong> Could you elaborate on this mechanism?<\/strong> He came here to Belo Horizonte?<\/strong> How did the meeting go with Rosing?<\/strong>
\nAs a child, I had polio, and this had a big impact on me. I underwent multiple surgeries, the most aggressive of which was in 1960, when I was 14. In an operation to correct a shortened tendon, the doctors had to cut the bones in my foot. I spent 90 days in a cast. This had a profound, and probably a decisive, effect on how my life unfolded from there. Because of this limitation, I wasn\u2019t competitive in collective sports. But I always enjoyed riding my bike. At 16, I fitted it with an engine. I liked tinkering with machines, gears and linkages. This led me to study mechanical engineering later on.<\/p>\n
\nI have always enjoyed motorsports, and that\u2019s where my interest in mechanical engineering came from. As an undergraduate student, I managed Ant\u00f4nio L\u00facio [\u201cToninho\u201d] da Matta\u2019s kart team, which won the Brazilian championship in 1966. But during my second year of college, the School of Engineering at UFMG bought a computer, an IBM 1130, one of the first in Brazil. I soon began working as a programmer, and this eventually drew me into the computer science community.<\/p>\n
\nThere were only a few hundred of them. They were huge machines, each filling an entire room, and their computing power was much less than that of today\u2019s smart phones. They were difficult to program. I completed my training in mechanical engineering in 1971, all the while working with programming. The next year, a friend of mine, Ivan Moura Campos, a mathematics professor at UFMG, invited me to take a course in computer programming. And that\u2019s how I became a part-time lecturer.<\/p>\n
\nNo, it hadn\u2019t crossed my mind. After earning my degree, besides my role as a part-time lecturer at UFMG, I worked as a programmer at the now-defunct National Bank. In 1973, the government launched a project to develop technologist-level undergraduate programs at five institutions: UFMG, PUC-Rio [Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro], the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul [UFRGS], the Campina Grande campus of the Federal University of Para\u00edba [UFPB], and Centro Paula Souza, in S\u00e3o Paulo. In March that year, I was invited to work full-time in helping to implement the program at UFMG. It was an incredible experience.<\/p>\n
\nWe started on a blank slate. We formulated the entire curriculum, and had to hire professors. It was a unique, two-year, intensive training program divided into quarterly periods\u2014at that time, all university programs were divided into semesters. The same curriculum was implemented at five different schools.<\/p>\n
\nYes. The first admission exam was held in mid-1973. I served as program coordinator at UFMG for two years. Because the programs were using a novel approach, there could be pushback from the associate dean for undergraduate programs, so the Ministry of Education [MEC] thought it best to have program coordinators manage the funds directly, which meant I reported directly to the dean.<\/p>\n
\nThey\u2019ve come a long way. Brazil leads Latin America and has world-class teaching and research. Our graduate programs are competitive, we train highly competent professionals, but unfortunately we suffer from brain drain. Our top talents, many of whom have gone to college with taxpayer money, often end up working abroad. Much of the credit for the quality of Brazil\u2019s computer science education goes to Carlos Jos\u00e9 Pereira de Lucena, a professor at PUC-Rio who I regard as the father of computing in Brazil. He created the first master\u2019s program here, and played a crucial role at CAPES [the Brazilian Federal Agency for Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education]. He also influenced me to go to Canada for doctoral studies at the University of Waterloo, the country\u2019s most prolific startup incubator\u2014BlackBerry smart phones were developed there.<\/p>\n
\nI defended my doctoral thesis in 1982. When I returned, professor Lucena, then head of the computer science department at CAPES, invited me to serve on committees evaluating graduate programs. In 1984 I returned for a three-year postdoctoral program at Waterloo. While there, I was appointed as Lucena\u2019s successor. I served for two terms as head of the department.<\/p>\n
\nMy early interests were algorithms and information retrieval [a branch of computer science that deals with the storage of documents and retrieval of the data they contain], but I later branched out into artificial intelligence [AI]. This change of course will be better understood in the context of the industrial revolutions that have happened in the past. The first, in the nineteenth century, resulted from the invention of the steam engine; the second, in the early twentieth century, was ushered in by the internal combustion engine and electricity. These are general-purpose technologies that are a part of our everyday lives. Artificial intelligence is also a general-purpose technology, and should have the same dramatic effect that the combustion engine and electricity had on society. The third industrial revolution occurred in the 1990s when Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web. The internet can be thought of as a repository of texts. And people needed mechanisms to retrieve those texts, which led to the development the first search engines. In the 1980s I began working with natural language processing, an interest I acquired during my doctoral search.<\/p>\n
\nYes. The most iconic, of course, was Google, developed in 1998 at Stanford University. In 1993, my supervisor, Gaston Gonnet, developed one of the earliest search engines for the internet, which he later spun off into one of the largest IT [Information Technology] companies in Canada, OpenText Corporation. He created a total of 10 startups. Waterloo is Canada\u2019s hot spot for startups, and while there I was infected with the entrepreneurial virus.<\/p>\n
\nIn a way, yes. In 1985, Gonnet came to Brazil to deliver a course on algorithm design. We met up and he suggested we create a company specializing in text-search algorithms, the basic mechanism of search engines. I kept the idea in the back of my mind. Ten years later, while lecturing at UFMG, one of my students, Victor Ribeiro, developed a search bot that could crawl the internet and retrieve pages from target web servers.<\/p>\n
\nNo, just a software program, or bot, that had this function. Creating a search engine was not an easy task back then. Nobody knew how to do it. After he completed the program, Ribeiro came to work with me at the Information Processing Laboratory [Latin], which I had created in the 1980s. One day, he watched as his colleague browsed online bookstores on the internet. He would visit each store, and use the store\u2019s proprietary software to find a book. Victor thought: \u201cWhy don\u2019t I use my bot to search all online bookstores at the same time, and return the aggregate search results to users?\u201d<\/p>\n
\nYes, to find books from bookstores anywhere in Brazil and around the world. This is known as a metasearch engine: using third-party engines to retrieve pages from each business\u2019s server, aggregate the search results, and display them to users. This was the starting point for an entire family of metasearch engines: BookMiner, for books; CDMiner, for CDs; SoftMiner, for software, etc. Metasearch is currently a thriving industry. AirBnb, Trivago, and MaxMilhas are all examples of metasearch engines. We created our engine at a time when nobody knew how to do it.<\/p>\n
\nIt all started at Latin. The Miner family of Web agents was a success, and the department\u2019s network soon became overwhelmed. The number of engine users was doubling every 30 days. Because we were no longer able to host the system on the university\u2019s servers, we made a deal to host the Miner family on UOL. At the end of 1998, we won an iBest award [Brazil\u2019s most prestigious internet ward] as the most popular and most high-tech website. The Miner family was then being maintained with money out of my own and Ribeiro\u2019s pockets. He decided to quit his job to dedicate himself to the business, a must for any entrepreneur to be successful. I continued my work at UFMG. In early 1999, I opened a newspaper and was surprised to find an article by business columnist Luis Nassif, titled \u201cThe Miner family.\u201d He praised our engine as a \u201ccutting-edge technology born out of a university project.\u201d I immediately called two of my colleagues\u2014Ivan Moura Campos and Guilherme Emrick, an investor and the founder of Biobr\u00e1s, an insulin manufacturer\u2014and convinced them to invest in the business. And that\u2019s how Miner started.<\/p>\n
\nThe amount was not publicly disclosed but it was a relatively small investment. Ultimately, UOL became very interested in the business and acquired it in June 1999. I am not at liberty to disclose the acquisition price. Ribeiro would go on to work as Chief Technology Officer at UOL for several years. This was one of the first success cases involving a spinoff from a university project.<\/p>\n
\nYes. When we created the search engine at Latin I wanted it to be co-owned by the university. But there was a lot of bureaucracy involved and this proved impracticable. Ribeiro and I agreed that if the business were successful we would make a donation to UFMG. So we donated R$100,000, or the present-day equivalent of around US$90,000.<\/p>\n
\nWe suggested dividing the money into three parts: one part for modernizing the laboratory, another part for creating a graduate library for ICEx [Institute of Exact Sciences], and the third part for creating a permanent scholarship program for scientific initiation in computing. This money was placed into an endowment fund managed by FUNDEP [UFMG\u2019s Foundation for Research Development] and the interest went to the Miner Latin scholarship program.<\/p>\n
\nIn September 1999 I met Berthier Ribeiro-Neto, a professor here at UFMG, at the University of California, Berkeley. While there, we made plans to create a general search engine instead of a metasearch engine. Two months later, we launched Todobr. We founded Akwan Information Technologies as the search engine provider, with companies like Odebrecht, Editora Abril, and the iG and UOL portals as clients. The tool soon expanded to other countries, like Chile and Spain.<\/p>\n
\nUnlike Google, which was a media company, Akwan was a technology provider. Todobr was a huge success. Akwan had a strong R&D [research and development] department and offered cutting edge technology. This was enabled by collaboration with a world-class research group, like the one today at UFMG\u2019s Computer Science Department.<\/p>\n
\nIt was created in the room that now houses the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. We soon moved it off the campus to a building near UFMG, but continued to collaborate closely with the university. I was determined to keep everything aboveboard, so I devised a special corporate mechanism.<\/p>\n
\nWe created a corporation, Akwan S.A. [Sociedade An\u00f4nima<\/em>], and donated 5% of the shares to a foundation linked to UFMG, FUNDEP. We described the university as a partner in the business, although it wasn\u2019t in the strict sense of the term. We often attended international conferences also frequented by people from Google, where we discussed our experience at Akwan. This was what put us on their radar. Google had just completed its IPO [Initial Public Offering] in 2004, and was looking to establish a presence in Latin America. Near the end of the year, we received a visit from Google\u2019s vice president of engineering, Wayne Rosing.<\/p>\n
\nYes. But because I was in Europe, he was met by Berthier, Akwan\u2019s executive director, and by founding partners Guilherme Emrich, then a co-owner of investment consultancy FIR Capital, and professor Ivan Campos, the two of whom had previously invested in Miner. Akwan had two other partners, Marcus Regueira, from FIR Capital, and Alberto Henrique Laender, a professor at UFMG.<\/p>\n
\nWe met at a hotel in downtown Belo Horizonte. We were reluctant to take him to Akwan because we were afraid our engineers might recognize him. But he was adamant about visiting the company, while we did everything we could to stall him. At one point, he said: \u201cJust a minute, let me contact Mountain View [where Google is headquartered, in California].\u201d He asked us to download a Nondisclosure Agreement [NDA]\u2014a standard procedure before initiating negotiations\u2014and signed it. My partners then agreed to take him to visit the company. To prevent Google\u2019s interest in Akwan from leaking, we told the researchers that he was just someone visiting our offices. But one of our engineers had attended the International World Wide Web Conference in New York a few months prior, and recognized him: \u201cThis guy is from Google!\u201d The very thing we were trying to prevent from happening, happened\u2014the news leaked.<\/p>\n
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