Career Summary

Augusto Sampaio is a graduate of Centro de Informática (CIn) at Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE) (BSc 1985 and MSc 1988) and Oxford PhD, 1993. From 1995 to 2007 he was an Associate professor at CIn-UFPE, and since 2007 he is a Software Engineering Full Professor at the same institution. In 2010 he received the title of Comendador da Ordem Nacional do Mérito Científico (Commander of the National Order of Scientific Merit) awarded by the Brazilian President.In 2016, he received the title of Doctor Honoris Causa of the University of York (UK). The Brazilian Software Engineering Comission awarded him a distimction as a Honoured Researcher, in 2017, and in 2018 he received the award for Scientific Merit from the Brazilian Computer Society. In 2021, he became a member of the Pernambuco Science Academy (Academia Pernambucana de Ciências). He holds a top level scholarship as Productive Researcher from CNPq (the Brazilian National Research Agency), since 1995.

As a result of his PhD thesis, he contributed an innovative approach to compilation based on algebraic transformations; the work has been published as a book in 1997. A joint work with C.A.R Hoare and He Jifeng resulted in establishing a formal link between algebraic and operational semantics. Linking theories and tools, model and program analysis and transformation, and model based testing are among his major research topics.

He has coordinated several national and international projects, including several projects jointly funded by NSF (USA) and CNPq (Brazil), among other collaboration projects with the UK and China. More recently, he was the Brazilian coordinator (Principal Investigator - PI) of the COMPASS project (http://www.compass-research.eu), funded by the European Commission under an FP7 call. Currently, he coordinates a National Institute for Science and Technology (INCT) on Software Engineering, a project on Robotic System Modelling, Simulation and Verification, in cooperation with the University of York, and a project on the Verification of Smart Contracts with The Blockhouse Technology (UK).

He has also significantly focused on cooperation with industry: particularly, since 2002 he is the PI of a long term collaboration with Motorola, on the development and application of formal testing and analysis techniques to mobile phone applications. This programme is part of what became known as the Brazil Test Center, which has attracted a significant amount in funding over the years, with the participation of more than a thousand collaborators, including students, engineers and researchers. It is responsible for the test of most applications that run on Motorola’s mobile phones, worldwide. The infrastructure includes some 4G testing Labs that were unique in the south hemisphere, when the lab was setup. The Brazil Test Center has received several prizes for excellence in research and development and for innovation. Concerning academic qualifications in the context of this project, Augusto Sampaio has had a major role in the conception and implementation of a novel educational programme that is now widely known in Brazil as Software Residency; this gives young Software Engineers the kind of experience that medical doctors obtain with a residency in a hospital. The course involves a theoretical background and hands-on training, at an industry site, and has been extensively exercised in the context of the cooperation with Motorola, where the emphasis was on a specialised background on Software Testing. As a result, more than 600 students have graduated, from all over Brazil, and the course model has been awarded a Prize on Software Quality and Productivity by the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation; this has inspired subsequent calls from CNPq to spread the model throughout the country. Since 2006, Augusto Sampaio has also established a cooperation project with Embraer, both on testing and on qualitative and quantitative analysis of models of avionics applications. Currently he also established a cooperation with The Blockhouse Technology in the context of the verification of smart contracts.

He has co-organised two international summer schools that gave rise to two books in Springer LNCS; one was on Testing Techniques in Software Engineering, where he has contributed both as co-editor and as co-author of one of the chapters. He has also co-organised the UTP Symposium dedicated to celebrate Tony Hoare's 85th Anniversary, and contributed book chapters dedicated to the festschifts of Robin Milner and A.W. Roscoe. Augusto Sampaio has been participating in the PC of the main national and international conferences related to formal methods (FM, SEFM, ICFEM, ICTAC, IFM, FMi, ICTSS, ISOLA, UTP, VSTTE. SBMF, SBES, among others), and has participated in panels and delivered calls as invited speakers; He was a keynote at ICFEM, SBMF and SBES and gave invited talks at Motorola Labs at Basingstoke, at the Oxford University Computing Lab, Kent University, Universidade do Minho, East China Normal University, and the British Computer Society, among others. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Formal Aspects of Computing, Science of Computer Programming, two of the major journals on Software Engineering and Formal Methods. He constantly reviews papers for journals, including Theoretical Computer Science, Acta Informatica, Software Testing Verification and Reliability, among others. He is a member of the Steering Committee of ICTAC since 2004 and was the PC chair for ICTAC 2016, in Taiwan. From 2013 to 2017 he was a member of the Technical Committee 1 (TC1) of IFIP. From 2014 to 2019 he was also a member of the Awards Committee for Formal Methods Europe, responsible for two awards (the FME fellowship for distinguished service to the formal methods community; and the FM Symposium's most-influential paper); Since 2020 he is the Chair of this committee. He has supervised more than 40 graduate students (PhD and MSc) and has published more than 100 journal and conference papers.

At CIn-UFPE, Augusto Sampaio has been Vice-Coordinator for Undergraduate Studies (1996-1998), Vice-Coordinator for Graduate Studies (1998-2001), Coordinator for Graduate Studies (2001-2003), Research Coordinator (2005-2013), and Head of the Computer Science Department (2013-2019); also, he was the Coordinator for Industry-Academia Cooperation (2013-2019).

Augusto Sampaio has also contributed to shape the policies for education and research in Computer Science as the Planning Director of the Brazilian Computer Society, and as a member of the expert committees of the Brazilian Research Councils (CNPq and CAPES) that evaluate all the higher-education institutions in Brazil and the major applications for funding.

Augusto Sampaio is one of the most distinguished Brazilian Computer Scientists in the area of Software Engineering with emphasis on Formal Methods; he was one of the founders of the Brazilian Commission for Formal Methods, and has continuously contributed to consolidate the conference organized by this commission (SBMF) with international standards. SBMF is already a well-established conference in the Formal Methods international community, and since 2010 its proceedings are published by Springer, in the LNCS series. He has also significantly contributed with the Commission for Software Engineering, and the associated conference (SBES).