Biography

He entered UFPE in 1994, in the bachelor's program in Computer Science of what was then the Department of Informatics, with a CNPq scientific initiation scholarship, and graduated in August 1999. In March 1997 a group of students founded CITi, the Center's junior enterprise (IT consulting, software and courses), and he was among the founders: director of courses in the first year, chief executive in 1998, board member until 2000.

The master's degree (2000–2002), with Geber Ramalho, came out of the project Intelligent Agents for Complex Environments (Agentes Inteligentes para Ambientes Complexos), on agents that generate real-time musical accompaniment. The dissertation, D'Accord Guitar, defended in November 2002, is a system that takes a song's chord chart and produces the guitar performance: it chooses the positions on the fretboard, models the guitarist's hand and animates the performance for those learning.

In the same year the master's program began, the system became a company. Daccord Music Software was born in 2000 within the computer music group at CIn, was pre-incubated at Recife BEAT, the Center's high-technology business base, and was incorporated as a corporation (sociedade anônima) in 2001. Cabral was development lead; Violão Player, from 2001, was the first product. In 2003 the company was selling to the United States and Europe; in 2004 it was among the debut companies of Porto Digital. In the FINEP Innovation Award, Small Company category, Northeast stage, it placed third in 2007, second in 2008 and first in 2009, when it was a national finalist; it won the regional stage again in 2012. It received R$1.68 million in economic subsidy from FINEP in 2008 and an investment from the Criatec Fund, BNDES's seed-capital fund, in 2010. Today there are two legal entities: the corporation of 2001, which from 2014 began operating as Escribo, and Daccord Tecnologia Ltda, opened in 2014, which uses the brand and of which he has been a partner since 2018, with Rodrigo Pereira, who runs it, and Filipe Calegário.

From 2003 to 2008 he did his doctorate in generative artificial intelligence, with Jean-Pierre Briot and François Pachet, at LIP6, the computer science laboratory of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris 6, now Sorbonne Université), in the multi-agent systems team, with a CAPES scholarship. Briot supervised the thesis and Pachet, of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris, co-supervised it; from 2003 to 2007 he worked with the music team of the Sony laboratory. In 2005 he was chargé de travaux dirigés for Introduction to Artificial Intelligence at the Sorbonne / Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris 6). The thesis, Harmonisation automatique en temps réel, deals with a system that automatically generates, in audio and in real time, the harmonization of an improvised melody from partial information; it was defended on 9 July 2008, with the grade très honorable, and UFPE recognized the degree in 2010. Also from the doctorate is the validation of EDS, the Sony CSL system that automatically discovers audio descriptors, in a chord recognizer (ISMIR 2005).

The collaboration with Sony CSL continued after the thesis: in 2015, an application demonstration at IJCAI, with Mathieu Ramona, of a system that generates the accompaniment of a song from the recording of a single performer; in 2017, Brazyle, the Brazilian part of the Flow Machines project of Sony CSL, on artificial intelligence for music creation. From Flow Machines came the album Hello World (2018), one of the first albums created by AI in the world (album credits).

He returned to Brazil in 2007, before the defense, and worked in Rio de Janeiro, from February 2007 to June 2008, as a developer, software engineer and later project lead at DATASUS, the SUS informatics department, hired by CTIS. From the same period comes the collaboration with researchers at IMPA.

In 2007 Daccord opened MusiGames Studio, its games business unit, at Porto Digital, to bring the audio technology it already had into games. He was the company's chief technology officer from June 2008 to May 2010. Drums Challenge reached the App Store in June 2009 and ended the month among the best-selling music games in the United States and the United Kingdom; the iPad version, released in April 2010, topped the category in the United States. In 2009 he organized, with Geber Ramalho, the 12th Brazilian Symposium on Computer Music in Recife, signing on behalf of the company, and from 2009 to 2010 he taught in the Music Production program at Faculdades Integradas Barros Melo.

The Federal Rural University of Pernambuco (Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco), founded in 1947, is headquartered in Dois Irmãos, in Recife, with units in Serra Talhada, Belo Jardim and Cabo de Santo Agostinho: about 16,000 students, 1,300 faculty members and 54 undergraduate programs. The Department of Statistics and Informatics houses the bachelor's program in Information Systems, created in 2008 under REUNI, with its first class in 2009. He was appointed assistant professor in May 2010 and remained until August 2014. He coordinated the program and the laboratories from 2011 to 2014; he was deputy head of the department from 2012 to 2014, a member of the university's Teaching, Research and Extension Council, of the graduate program committee in Applied Informatics and of the program committee, deputy extension coordinator and institutional representative of the Brazilian Computer Society. From 2011 to 2014 he held the CNPq productivity grant in technological development and innovative extension, level 2. Outside the university, he served on the advisory board of PRAISE, a European project on tutoring agents in music practice communities.

During this period, research came to have its own groups and funding. MusTIC (Music, Technology, Interactivity and Creativity) was founded in 2011 and in 2013 received a CNPq Universal project for a method of creating digital musical instruments. The audio-monitoring project for public safety (CNPq and FACEPE, 2010–2014) trained classifiers to recognize gunshots and screams in microphones. PsyFun, on digital games for cognitive psychology, began in 2013 with the Decisores Virtuais project, funded by FACEPE. He supervised four master's degrees at UFRPE.

At the company, he took charge of the education front: he was a research fellow in CNPq's RHAE program from 2008 to 2010 and chief technology and creative officer. The Digital Music Education Platform (CNPq, FINEP and Escribo, 2010–2014) responded to Law 11.769/2008, which made music content mandatory in schools without there being licensed teachers in sufficient numbers: games for the student, a course for the teacher, indicators for management. From it came Turma do Som (2012, with pedagogical consulting by Cecília Cavalieri França) and the book Nós da Educação: Música, for 4th and 5th grades, published by Ática (2014). In 2014 the corporation began operating as Escribo Inovação para o Aprendizado, an edtech and digital publisher of games, animation and interactive systems for education; Cabral left the company in 2017.

The Center for Informatics (Centro de Informática) began as the Department of Statistics and Informatics in 1974, became separate as the Department of Informatics in 1983 and became a Center in 1999. It has four undergraduate programs (Computer Science, 1974; Computer Engineering, 2002; Information Systems, 2010; Artificial Intelligence, 2025), academic and professional master's and doctoral programs with the highest CAPES rating, one of seven computing centers in the country at that level, more than twenty laboratories and an incubator. From it came CESAR (1996), CITi (1997) and Porto Digital (2000). Cabral has been an assistant professor at the Center since 2014.

Since 2020 he has been part of PRAIA (Centro de Pesquisa Realmente Aplicada em Inteligência Artificial, the Truly Applied Artificial Intelligence Research Center), with about one hundred researchers from UFPE, UPE and UFRN, coordinated by Geber Ramalho. He teaches Introdução à Multimídia, Projetão, Computação Musical, Jogos Digitais, Criatividade Computacional and, since 2026, Tendências em Mídia e Interação: sixty classes since 2015. He coordinates MusTIC with Geber Ramalho and Filipe Calegário; the group described itself in a 2019 article with five axes, 21 projects and 42 researchers. He supervised two doctoral theses (VioLED, by Eduardo Santos Silva, 2022, and the gender-sensitive approach to teaching computational thinking in elementary school years 1–5, by Mychelline Souto Cunha, 2025) and fourteen master's dissertations, plus ten master's co-supervisions; the list is at Orientações. He coordinated with Filipe Calegário the 18th SBCM (2021), held by CIn with CESAR, and proposed to CNPq the 2019 National Science and Technology Week in Pernambuco.

Since October 2022 he has been the managing director of Alumni CIn, the association of the Center's former students, elected for the 2022–2025 term. At the Brazilian Computer Society, he was part of the steering committee of the Special Commission on Computer Music, which organizes the biennial SBCM, in 2011–2014, 2015–2017 and 2021–2022, and chaired it for the 2022–2023 term, with Filipe Calegário as vice-chair.

CESAR (Centro de Estudos e Sistemas Avançados do Recife, the Recife Center for Advanced Studies and Systems) is a private, non-profit innovation institute founded in 1996 in Recife, an anchor of Porto Digital. It describes itself as a school, an experimentation lab, a research and development center and a venture builder. In 2026 it reports units in Recife, Manaus, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Curitiba and Florida, in addition to the operation in Aveiro, Portugal, announced in 2023; 136 projects and 95 clients per year, one thousand startups supported in two years, and 4,500 students at CESAR School, whose professional graduate program began in 2007 and whose professional doctorate in Software Engineering dates from 2019.

Cabral chaired the Board of Directors from 2020 to 2026; before that, from January 2015 to 2020, he was vice-chair. He took board-member training courses at Fundação Dom Cabral (2015) and at IBGC (2019). During this period, and by decision of the board, the Board received the Women on Board certificate (2021); the institute signed a memorandum with Covilhã (2022), opened the Aveiro operation (2023) and signed a protocol with CCG/ZGDV in Guimarães (2025); it launched, with the Government of Pernambuco, SENAI and SENAC, Florescendo Talentos (2024), technical courses in about 170 state schools in more than 70 municipalities; it took the Smart Lipstick prototype to CES 2025, where it won the People's Choice at the SXSW Innovation Awards; and it published its first Social and Environmental Impact Report (2025). During that time he wrote articles on innovation as behavior change (2020) and on generative AI (2023), and the preface to O futuro das organizações pela perspectiva Design-Driven (2023).

ARIES (Agência Recife para Inovação e Estratégia, the Recife Agency for Innovation and Strategy) is a private non-profit association, registered in 2017 and active since 2018, qualified as a Social Organization by the municipality, created to think about Recife's long-term development. It has five founding members: Guilherme Cavalcanti, Sérgio Cavalcante, Fernando Holanda, Fernando Braga and Giordano Cabral. The work that defines it is the Plano Recife 500 Anos (Recife 500 Years Plan), the city's strategic plan with a 2037 horizon, carried out under a management contract between the City Hall and the Núcleo de Gestão do Porto Digital and published in a second edition by Cepe in 2022. In 2025 the agency began executing two projects with public funds: the inclusive adaptation of the Cajueiro Macro-Area (R$ 2.4 million, through 2027) and, as the delegated manager on the Brazilian side, FICOL 2 of the Recife–Nantes cooperation, financed by the French Development Agency: €2.21 million through 2028, with UFPE, Unicap, Porto Digital and CESAR as partners. Cabral is a member of the Board of Directors.

Porto Digital is Recife's technology park, created in July 2000 as a State public policy, with R$ 33 million of initial investment, and managed by the Núcleo de Gestão do Porto Digital, a private non-profit association qualified as a Social Organization in 2001, which operates under a management contract with the Government of Pernambuco. The 2025 results, released in March 2026, show 541 companies, 24,079 employees and revenue of R$ 7.4 billion, 19% above the previous year. Cabral's work in the park takes place through two training programs. The Residência Tecnológica (Technology Residency), from 2019, is a course integrated into technologist degree programs at six institutions in which student squads solve real challenges proposed by more than one hundred companies, with market mentors and cycles closed by demo days; in the second half of 2025 it served about 2,300 students in Recife and 3,700 including Aracaju and Brasília. The Embarque Digital (Digital Boarding), implemented in 2021 by the Recife City Hall with the park as technical partner, gives full scholarships in higher-education technology courses to those who completed all of high school in the public school system: 3,043 entrants and 1,130 graduates through September 2026. He has coordinated the Residência's pedagogy since 2019. He is a co-author of the study on the program presented at WASHES 2023 and a consultant to the Núcleo de Gestão for the park's internationalization and the Recife–Nantes cooperation. The coordination was paid, from 2022 to 2025, by research, development and innovation scholarships from Softex Recife, an association in the Softex network that maintains, under a 2023 ordinance, a scholarship program funded by companies and public entities.

Since October 2024 he has been an alternate member of the Municipal Council of Science, Technology and Innovation of Recife, created by Law 18,974/2024 to propose and assess the city's innovation policies. In 2026 Instituto Caldeira, an innovation hub in Porto Alegre founded in 2019 by a group of large companies from Rio Grande do Sul, created a technical-scientific council, in which Cabral takes part remotely.

Outside the councils, he consults for companies on business strategy and intelligence and on the adoption of artificial intelligence, treated as an element of business transformation. The details of each council and each company are on Strategy and business.

The Lemann Center for Educational Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Brazil is a center of the Stanford Graduate School of Education dedicated to public education policies suited to Brazilian reality. He was a Visiting Scholar at the center from September 2023 to August 2024, with UFPE and CESAR affiliation. The period produced three texts with Jean-Pierre Briot on artificial intelligence in Brazil (2024) and the project Preparing Brazil's Youth: Integrating Vocational Training into Schools, funded by Stanford Impact Labs in 2025, of which he is lead researcher, with Eric Bettinger and with the Pernambuco State Department of Education, Fundação Itaú, CESAR School and the Lemann Center as partners. The project tests two models of vocational education integrated into high school (renewable energy courses in rural schools and technology electives in more than 130 public schools in the state) with randomized and quasi-experimental evaluation.

In 2025 Cabral founded FAROL with Filipe Calegário at the CIn, a research group that measures how organizations and people work with agentic artificial intelligence; in 2026 the group becomes the Instituto FAROL de Fluência Agêntica (FAROL Institute of Agentic Fluency). The scale has six axes and five levels; from it derive the Meu Mapa de IA, the AI Index for companies, the Arsenal of Tools catalog and the Arena das IAs, whose first experiment was the 2026 World Cup Pool: 124 models, 104 games, 5,797 predictions between June 11 and July 19. In the same year he created the course Tendências em Mídia e Interação (Trends in Media and Interaction), in which each student builds their own AI-based prospecting tool.

Cooperation with France runs through the résumé from 2001 to 2024: the Smart-es project, between UFPE and Université Paris VI (2001–2004), on learning and adaptation techniques for e-commerce, games, and internet search; the doctorate in generative artificial intelligence at LIP6, with Jean-Pierre Briot and François Pachet of Sony CSL Paris, Sony's laboratory in Europe, where the Flow Machines project originated; the doctoral committees at IMPA with both of them (2009 and 2010); and the three texts with Briot from 2024. With IMPA, in Rio de Janeiro, there are co-authorships with Luiz Velho (SBCM 2007, SIGGRAPH 2010). In the European Union, he was an Advisory Board member (Advisory Board) of PRAISE from 2012 to 2014, a project of the 7th Framework Programme coordinated by CSIC, with €2.3 million from the EU (CORDIS). With McGill University and Inria, he co-authored with Marcelo Wanderley and Stéphane Huot the method and toolkit for digital musical instruments (IEEE MultiMedia, 2017). In the United States, the Lemann Center, at Stanford University, as Visiting Scholar (2023–2024), and the Stanford Impact Labs, as lead researcher of the project Preparing Brazil's Youth (2025). Through Porto Digital, he has led since 2019, as an internationalization consultant, the Brazilian side of the Recife–Nantes cooperation, with ADN Ouest and Nantes Métropole, in which ARIES carries out FICOL 2. During the period in which he chaired the Board of CESAR, the institute signed a memorandum with Covilhã (2022), opened an operation in Aveiro (2023), and signed a protocol with CCG/ZGDV in Guimarães (2025).

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