Pablo Cerdeira

Programming since the mid-1990s, Pablo has worked across several fields, including KDE, the Linux desktop environment, where he helped translate the KCalc calculator into Portuguese. He developed advanced cryptography libraries, such as Blowfish.dll, commercially distributed since the late 1990s. While still a student, he wrote Labeo, the system that published grades and absences for students at the University of São Paulo Law School. It ran for more than 20 years, from 2001 to 2021, without a single security incident.

At FGV Direito Rio, where he taught Law and Technology for nearly two decades and coordinated the Center for Justice and Society and the Center for Technology and Society, Pablo founded Supremo em Números together with Joaquim Falcão. He programmed the robots that captured and reconstructed more than 1.2 million cases from the Supreme Federal Court, the entire Court archive. The project launched at the Court in 2011, with the President of the Court in attendance, and its data informed many other academic studies, changed the behavior of major litigants, and even underpinned proposed amendments to the Constitution.

As Deputy Secretary for Consumer Protection for Rio de Janeiro, Pablo created Procon Carioca and programmed the online service system himself. He donated it to the Ministry of Justice, and it became the national consumidor.gov.br platform. Then, as the City’s Chief Data Officer from 2013 to 2016, he led PENSA, Rio’s data office, combining bus GPS, health, infrastructure and Waze data to prepare the city for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. Rio was one of the founding partners of Waze’s city program. Between 2018 and 2019, after leaving City Hall, Pablo managed Waze’s worldwide historical database, about 70 TB per year, and transferred it to Google, which had not previously held it.

With the teams he coordinated at FGV, Pablo helped draft the Marco Civil da Internet and Brazil’s General Data Protection Law, the two laws that now govern the internet and personal data in Brazil, and worked for both to pass in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. He was invited to testify at public hearings before the Supreme Federal Court on WhatsApp blocking and the Marco Civil, and before Congress: on Bill 2,303/2015 on cryptoassets, the Cybercrimes CPI and the Fake News CPI.

Pablo has taken this work to Harvard, Columbia University, Google offices in Washington, New York and Paris, Smart City Expo in Barcelona, the World Economic Forum in San Francisco, Zhengzhou in China, and Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Lima and Lisbon.