In order to meet the guiding principles of the new PhD course, considering the evolution of the faculty of the Graduation Program in Computer Engineering (PPGEC), and the current demands of Stricto Sensu Graduation in Computer Engineering in the context of that the PPGEC is inserted, the PPGEC Collegiate established "Computer Science" as a single concentration area of the Program following the trend of the other National Graduate Computer Programs.

In addition, the Collegiate has revised the lines of research to adequately represent the evolution of the Program, as follows: the line of Intelligent Computing became Computational Intelligence and the line of Software Engineering has given way to the line called Modeling and Computational Systems.

Moreover, the curriculum structure implemented in 2014 and positively cited by the CAPES evaluation committee in the last four-year report in 2018 has also been improved to incorporate the necessary adjustments for the new PhD course. The PPGEC disciplines continue to be divided into three categories: basic subjects, general electives and elective courses per research line.

The basic disciplines touch on the central aspects of a computer course, but at the graduate level. As established in the new internal regulations of the Program, for the doctorate course, the student must take 3 of these disciplines. They fall into the category of basic subjects:

• Computer Architecture
• Database
• Scientific Methodology and Didactics of Higher Education
• Programming Paradigms
• Probability and stochastic processes
• Computer network
• Operational systems
• Theory of Computation and Analysis of Algorithms

In addition to attending 3 of the previous basic subjects the student must fulfill the credits referring to the following 3 disciplines to complement his training as a Doctor:

• Systematic Review of Literature
• Complementary Seminars
• Research project

According to the internal rules of the course, other 3 subjects must be taken by the student, the latter being of the category of elective subjects. The disciplines of the elective category per research line have as objective to deepen specific aspects of the lines of this Graduate Program. These are:

• Research Line: Modeling and Computational Systems
• Software Engineering
• Modeling and simulation
• Applications in Software Engineering
• Requirements Engineering
• Research Line: Computational Intelligence
• Computational Intelligence
• Applications in Computational Intelligence
• Pattern Recognition

The general electives focus on advanced studies on topics that can be used by students from the two PPGEC research lines. These disciplines are as follows:

• Deep Learning
• Software Development Environments
• Network Science
• Evolutionary computing
• Parallel computing
• Experimental Software Engineering
• Swarm Intelligence
• Data Mining
• Modeling and Business Processes
• Computational Neuroscience
• Multi-objective optimization
• Digital Image Processing
• Digital signal processing
• Artificial neural networks
• Multimodal Systems
• Advanced Topics in Computational Intelligence
• Advanced Topics in Software Engineering
• Advanced Topics in Pattern Recognition