Computing is present in key advances in all areas of knowledge. New forms of interaction between sciences, at various levels and scales, are mediated by Information Technology, which is the symbiosis of Computer Science with different domains of knowledge. In fact, many of the great recent scientific discoveries are the results of the work of multidisciplinary teams involving computer scientists. Computing permeates all other areas in its various forms of scientific research, such as simulation, modeling, monitoring, and measurement. It can be said that Computation has revolutionized scientific research and is today recognized as the “third pillar” to support research along with the pillars of theory and experimentation.
According to the data presented in the CAPES 2013 document in Computing (CAPES 2013), Brazil is the fourth largest market for information and communication technology (ICT) and seventh largest in information technology (IT). The country is expected to reach third position in 2022. According to the Brazilian Association of Information and Communication Technology Companies (Brasscom), it is estimated that the ICT sector has moved US $ 233 billion in 2012 and that reach Approximately US $ 430 billion over 10 years. The sector currently employs 2.5 million people and is expected to increase by more than one million professionals over the next ten years. According to MCTI data, in the same period the Brazilian software market is expected to grow by around 400%.
This positive scenario generates demand for the formation of qualified human resources, requiring planning and greater investments. In addition, a high degree of innovation and research is needed if the country is to reach increasingly prominent international positions. In this sense, it is of national interest to intensify postgraduate programs aimed at training masters and PhDs in Computing. In particular, there is a demand by computer professionals increasingly able to extract knowledge from large volumes of data, the so-called data scientists (DSC 2015).
Nowadays, it can be said that several companies are urging the hiring of data scientists. They are immersed in the deluge of data (from English, Data Deluge) (Berman 2008), where there is a great deal of data, with different types of information on an unprecedented scale. This demand for these computer science experts is well ahead of the supply capacity. The treatment of the data deluge being produced by the sciences and billions of users of global Internet services presents itself as one of the great challenges for the current knowledge society. In the business world, data scientists are key players in the Big Data scenario (Jagadish et al., 2014). They are able to structure this data and find patterns to advise executives on the implications for products, processes, and decisions (Dhar 2013).
However, the demand for data scientists is much broader. The deluge of data is generally manifold in multiple facets, a fact that has been driving initiatives in several areas, in addition to the business world, in order to better understand it. In the sciences, the data deluge appeared as the expression of a new way of research (Wright 2014), encouraging biologists, astronomers, physicists, and other researchers from different scientific areas to face computational problems in the so-called e-science, which become Barriers to their findings. In the government sector, there are opportunities to look at huge public sector databases to generate more efficient planning as well as new services that can improve citizen service. The data scientist is, therefore, a professional trained mainly in the analysis, interpretation and manipulation of large volumes of data, in order to bring the scientific method to the most different sectors.
In this context, the Graduate Program in Computer Science (PPCIC) begins with a master’s degree stricto sensu (academic master’s degree). The program combines basic and applied research. This is a characteristic present in the profile of the researchers of the current and expected faculty for the future teachers to be incorporated into the program. This combination establishes a promising strategy, while at the same time establishing theoretical results that subsidize the construction of new applications for solving practical issues, practical problems often lead to the development of new theoretical frameworks. This approach adopted by our group is adherent to the multidisciplinary process of Computing. The program is part of the Computer Science knowledge area and is organized in the lines Data Management and Applications and Data Based Methods.