Brivaldo Alves da Silva Junior's doctoral thesis, entitled "Automatic Inference of BGP Community Semantics" received an honorable mention from CAPES (Brazilian Federal Agency for Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education). “[The work] brings unprecedented advances to the understanding of so-called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) communities, labels used by network operators to define traffic policies on the Internet. Despite their importance for traffic engineering, the lack of standardized documentation of BGP communities hinders their use and understanding”, commented his advisor, Ronaldo Ferreira.
According to the professor, the thesis developed innovative techniques capable of automatically inferring the meaning of these communities from public data collected on the Internet itself. “The results of the thesis allow for the dynamic documentation of routing practices, increasing transparency and security in the operation of networks that form the Internet. Furthermore, the methods created can be applied on a global scale, benefiting both the scientific community and professionals working in the management of critical infrastructure.”
The professor also notes that the work was chosen as the best thesis in the area of Computer Networks at the Brazilian Symposium on Computer Networks and Distributed Systems (SBRC 2025), the most traditional scientific event in the field in the country (see article here). “The honorable mention in the CAPES Thesis Award reinforces the excellence of the research developed in the PPGCC and consolidates the University as a national reference in studies on the internet and computer networks”, he emphasizes.
For the coordinator of the PPGCC, Awdren Fontão, this is an important achievement. “This is an honorable mention from a very important award, a national scientific recognition of Brivaldo's work. This demonstrates the quality of what we deliver as an institution, as a PPGCC (Graduate Program in Computer Science), and the quality of training of our doctoral students, considering that we are a relatively new doctoral program compared to others. I would like to publicly congratulate both Professor Ronaldo for his guidance, and Brivaldo. This is an achievement specifically during his training and demonstrates that his journey as a doctoral student is not just about the isolated day-to-day work, but it is work that truly impacts society”.
“Receiving an honorable mention in the Capes award and also the award for best thesis at SBRC, both in 2025, is the result of years of dedication and the positive impact of the work of the PPGCC at UFMS, both for science and for society”, concluded Brivaldo, who is a graduate of the Computer Science undergraduate program, completed his master's degree in the same area at UFMS, and has been a professor at the Faculty of Computing since 2013.