The IEEE IAS student chapter at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora invited Hal-AI to take the artificial intelligence industry seat at ENTENSE 2026 — the only Brazilian event selected in the society's global MINE competition.
The invitation came from the IEEE IAS Student Chapter (Industry Applications Society) at UFJF, which has organised ENTENSE since its first edition. For the third one, the students wanted someone who would not talk about artificial intelligence as a promise: they wanted people who build and run autonomous agents in production, for real customers. Hal-AI was the company chosen for that seat, represented by founder and CEO Marcos Alves, an engineer with degrees in both Computing and Electrical Engineering and an IEEE Senior Member.
ENTENSE exists to pull students out of classroom abstraction and put them in front of the people who run the technology every day. That is the invitation Hal-AI accepted.
The event: the Brazilian chapter approved by IEEE IAS
ENTENSE 2026 — The Engineering of the Future took place on May 6, 2026, in the UFJF auditorium, in Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, with a second day of technical visits to the Mercedes-Benz plant in the same city on May 7.
What sets this edition apart is the seal: ENTENSE 2026 was officially selected in the global MINE competition (Mini Industry Networking Event) of IEEE IAS — the society's international programme that approves, among student chapters worldwide, the events that genuinely bring engineering education closer to industrial operations. In the organisers' words, the goal was to "show the world the strength of our engineering and the engagement of our faculty and students".
The event is run by the IEEE IAS chapter at UFJF with institutional support from the IEEE UFJF Student Branch. Lauro Abdallah was general coordinator, with Fabrício Prata Rodrigues as deputy coordinator and Sophia Alves leading marketing and the event website.
The talk: the next layer of intelligence
Marcos Alves took the stage at 1:20 p.m. with "The Future of AI: The Next Layer of Intelligence". The argument is the one Hal-AI makes in its product: the next leap is not in larger models but in the layer that sits between the model and the business — memory, context and autonomy, so that an agent stops answering questions and starts doing work.
He then joined the "Artificial Intelligence and Technology" panel at 2 p.m., on the impact of AI on the labour market and how new engineers should prepare for that shift. The panel was moderated by Professor Eduardo Aguiar, who teaches in UFJF's graduate programmes in Electrical Engineering and Computational Modelling and co-founded Stemis, and also featured Caian Dutra de Jesus, business manager at Stemis, and Ednaldo Teixeira da Silva, IT manager at U&M.
The day's programme also brought Fabrício Prata Rodrigues, Student Representative for the IEEE Minas Gerais Section, on connecting students to innovation; Lucas Assis Martins, business transformation agent at ArcelorMittal, with "Industry 4.0 in practice: what happens after the idea"; and Gustavo Giarolla, master engineer at U&M, on large-scale engineering. A second panel discussed entrepreneurship and startups.
Sponsorship, and why
Beyond the speaker and panellist seats, Hal-AI was a gold sponsor of ENTENSE 2026, alongside U&M Mineração e Construção as master supporter and Stemis, Nvoip and Vésper Energia Solar among the other sponsors.
It is the same choice the company made when it organised and sponsored the IEEE AI Pioneer Summit, named by IEEE Region 9 the best event of 2025 in Latin America and the Caribbean: backing the student chapters that put engineering students in front of the people who operate the technology. For a company building autonomous agents with memory and context, training that generation is not a branding exercise — it is tomorrow's market being built today.
The full programme, the speakers and the event's photo record are available at entense.com.br.
