“The gang of Braga”

By José Nuno Oliveira, Research Coordinator at the High-Assurance Software Lab (HASLab)

The agreement and collaboration protocol between INESC TEC and the University of Minho was signed 10 years ago (October 12, 2012) at the Azurém Campus, by Chairman José Manuel Mendonça and the Rector António Cunha.  

This observance reminds me of a path that began many years before, in 1989, when the “gang of Braga” – as they were known at INESC – initiated their connection to the now called INESC TEC. Apart from the memories of exceptional times, at a younger age and a period we can’t return to, I hope this short text shows, particularly to the younger generations, how important is the role played by institutions of interface between the classrooms and the surrounding environment to the the narrow national academic context.  

At the time, the U.Minho hosted the self-designated “GDCC – Disciplinary Group of Computer Science”, whose provisional facilities occupied an apartment in Braga – with the team meeting regularly in the kitchen (in the meantime adapted to tasks associated with the intellect, rather than the palate). Under the spirited guidance of Professor José Manuel Valença, said group had been paving a path of significant pedagogical affirmation, designing a new degree and new courses, thus engaged in the continuous study of new topics – at the pace of the 600 handwritten pages that José Valença reeled off each year, using his unique A4 notebooks, which were broadly “xeroxed” and disseminated.   

The possibility of “thinking outside the box” and increasing the “critical mass” via the association with INESC was quite enticing, and it had already been suggested, for a long time, by the late Professor Amílcar Sernadas, with whom José Valença worked regularly. More specifically, he had already participated, as a guest, in the “INESC senior meeting” that took place in Luso, in January of said year.  

A few months later (June 23, 1989), INESC and U.Minho established the first agreement, signed by the Rector Machado dos Santos and the INESC Chairmen, José Tribolet and Lourenço Fernandes. 

But, as so often happens, reality had already anticipated the formality: days after the meeting in Luso, we received an unexpected fax from Professor Vladimiro Miranda inquiring if we wanted to join, via INESC (which we weren’t part of yet), a Eureka proposal that Olivetti was concluding in Italy. Three days later, a reply via fax was sent, stating that the objectives of the Eureka proposal complied with “the work which the INESC (Norte) research team has been undertaking for some years, in the areas of software specification, rapid prototyping, implementation and reusability, using formal (mathematically sound) methods”.  

It was a reckless gamble by an academic group who aimed to disseminate the methods they taught and believed in outside the classrooms. They could not miss that opportunity. The “80% probability of acceptance” guaranteed by those who would become our “amici italiani” for many years soon materialised, and the Eureka 379 (SOUR) took off.  

If I were to narrate this enriching – yet long and intense – experience of academia-business interface (with a copious amount of information in HASLab’s archive) until the submission of the final product in 1995 (Bari), I’d end up with a lengthy chronicle. (One can barely read some faxes, but the emails, which were printed “à cause des mouches”, are still in pretty good conditions). 

But the focus is not this story. The main goal is to show the effectiveness, for more than 30 years, of the liaison between “the gang of Braga” and the industry, at international level. Something that wouldn’t be possible without an interface institution like INESC. Equally interesting was the impact that this experience had on teaching itself, significantly reinvigorated thanks to a success story that further justified promoting “good theories”.  

Still persisting is the distinctive feature perceived by the post-doc Joost Visser – a great friend, currently teaching at U.Leiden – when he coined the motto that HASLab established henceforth: “Improving practice through theory”. Which is, after all, the motto of good engineering practices, regardless of the domain.