Academic Information


University of Campinas

University of Campinas (UNICAMP) was officially founded on October 5th, 1966, as a public university located in the city of Campinas, in the State of São Paulo, Brazil. Even within Brazilian context, UNICAMP can be considered a young institution that has achieved international recognition for excellence through its innovative approach to education, research and services to society.

The project to create the university was a response to a growing demand for qualified personnel in a region of the country that, by the decade of the 1960s, accounted for 40% of Brazilian industrial capacity and 25% of its economically active population. Even before its installation, UNICAMP had already attracted more than 200 foreign professors from diverse areas and about 180 from the best Brazilian universities. The construction of Unicamp stimulated the potential of the region as a production and diffusion center of advanced scientific and technogical knowledge, attracting a significant number of companies to its surroundings, many of them founded by Unicamp former students and professors.

UNICAMP consists of 24 units (10 institutes and 14 schools) of teaching and research in different areas of knowledge, a vast hospital complex in Campinas and neighboring cities, 21 interdisciplinary research centers, two technical high schools, and several support units within a universe of approximately 50,000 people. The university has about 18,000 undergraduate students enrolled among approximately 70 different courses, 22,000 graduate students enrolled among 140 courses at Master's and Doctoral levels, as well as 1,700 faculty members. UNICAMP concentrates 15% of the total scientific production in Brazil and it is responsible for 12% of the undergraduate students in the country, as well as that same percentage of theses and dissertations.

The quality of its graduate system can be evidenced by various productivity indicators and verified by the triennial evaluations performed by the Brazilian Ministry of Education. In the most recent evaluations, UNICAMP consolidated its position as the Brazilian university receiving the highest grades in graduate programs. UNICAMP is recognized by the most prestigious international rankings of higher education. Times Higher Education (THE), Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) have included UNICAMP among the best universities in the world.

Institute of Computing

The Institute of Computing (formerly Computer Science Department) was the first academic institution in Brazil to offer a bachelor's degree in Computer Science. The course, created in 1969, served as a model for several other courses throughout the country.

The Institute currently offers two undergraduate degrees: Bachelor of Computer Science and Bachelor of Computer Engineering, the latter offered in joint with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UNICAMP. The Institute has a strong partnership with industry, having collaborations with private and governmental sectors. This cooperation promotes the production of scientific papers, the development of innovative research projects, the generation of intellectual property as patents, as well as fosters entrepreneurship.

The graduate program was started in 1977 and has earned a reputation for providing exceptional higher education. It provides a stimulating learning and research environment for students through a combination of high-level teaching, individual studies, high quality supervision and international opportunities of collaboration with other research centers in almost all fields of information technology, computer science and computer engineering.

The graduate program is consistently ranked as one of Brazil's top institutions in providing high-level research, and Master's and Doctorate degrees that carry prestige and professional recognition. The Computer Science graduate program has awarded more than 700 M.Sc. and 150 Ph.D. degrees. Many graduate students have received awards for best theses and dissertations of the area in Brazil, ranked in the yearly competition promoted by the Brazilian Computer Society. The graduate program in the Institute of Computing received degree 7 (the highest level of quality) in the evaluation of Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), a public foundation established within the Brazilian Ministry of Education.

Visual Informatics Laboratory

The Visual Informatics Laboratory houses graduate and undergraduate students, and researchers who work on interdisciplinary research topics involving image processing, computer vision, computer graphics, machine learning, computational geometry, content-based image retrieval, among others.

The laboratory has received grants from several Brazilian agencies (FAPESP, CNPq, CAPES, FINEP) and industrial partnerships. International cooperations have also contributed to fund the laboratory research.