Native to the capital of Alagoas,
Enthusiastic researchers,
Eager to make a dream come true:
Stacking up forces to transform Brazilian education.
This is how NEES was born in 2011 when professors and researchers Ig Ibert Bittencourt and Alan Pedro da Silva created a research center associated with the Computing Institute (IC) of Universidade Federal de Alagoas (Federal University of Alagoas – UFAL).
The initiative began as a dream: to positively impact Brazilian education by reducing inequality and offering better learning opportunities to the population. A dream that began to be cultivated long before.
A remarkable year in this story is 2007, when Ig, then a computer science Ph.D. student at Universidade Federal de Campina Grande (Federal University of Campina Grande – UFCG) in Paraíba, met the Ph.D. student Seiji Isotani, who was studying at Osaka University, in Japan.
They were the only Brazilian participants in the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED), the largest education-applied artificial intelligence in education event in the world. That year, the event took place in Los Angeles, United States.
“Why are we the only Brazilians here?” We started discussing the need to develop strong research in the field of computers in education. We then saw that our thoughts regarding proposals to change Brazilian education were aligned. “Since then we started working together”, revealed Prof. Ig.
From then on, the dream of generating a positive impact on Brazilian education started coming to life little by little. In 2009, Ig and Seiji received their PhDs and decided, together with Alan Pedro, who was finishing his doctorate at UFCG, to carry on with the research they were doing in the computers in education field. For this, they sought to obtain teaching positions at universities.
The first to attain a teaching position was Alan, who became a professor at Instituto Federal de Alagoas (Federal Institute of Alagoas – IFAL), where he lectured for three years. Afterward, Alan transferred to UFAL. Next, Ig Ibert was also granted a teaching position at UFAL, and Seij soon began his career as a professor at the Mathematics and Computing Institute (ICMC) of Universidade de São Paulo (University of São Paulo – USP), in São Carlos.
At UFAL, Ig and Alan found the fertile ground they needed to plant the seed of a research group with the purpose of transfering the results of research developed at the university to society. For this, they focused on social entrepreneurship and then created, in 2011, the Center for Excellence in Social Entrepreneurship (NEES).
Over the years, with the maturity of the researchers and the experience acquired by the group, NEES expanded its scope of action. In 2022, during a strategical planning workshop, the group decided to focus on promoting educational equity for social transformation. A slogan capable of translating into words the ideas that germinated from that seed cultivated in 2011.