Furtado's research focuses on computing methodology and techniques, mainly in databases and graphs, logic programming, and interactive storytelling.
Prof. Furtado attended the very first Entity-Relationship conference (ER 1979, Los Angeles, California) and had a fundamental role in establishing and developing the field of databases and conceptual modelling in Brazil for almost 4 decades.
Furtado also participated in the creation of the first Computer Science department in Brazil (and one of the first in the world) at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro in 1968.
Prof. Furtado has published pioneering books in data structures and organization of databases in the 1970s and 1980s, which were both important to establishing the field as a whole and to the education in Brazil.
He was honored in 1973 with a Norman Stuart Robertson Fellowship by University of Toronto; nominated as member of the Board of Trustees VLBD Endowment in 1975; nominated in 2006 as Commander of the Ordem Nacional do Mérito Científico of the Presidência da República do Brasil;[3] and in 2014 received the Peter P. Chen Award of Elsevier for Entity–relationship model research.