Face ao aumento do número de alunos, o Departamento de Engenharia Informática (DEISI) da ULHT, Lisboa, pretende recrutar doutorados em tempo integral com perfis em áreas core de Computer Science (Informática, Telecomunicações, Redes, Processamento de Sinal, IA,....).

Para além das actividades lectivas (max 12h/sem), o(a)s candidato(a)s estarão associados à Unidade de I&D COPELABS, afecta ao DEISI, como membros integrados, onde terão a oportunidade de desenvolver actividades de investigação. 

COPELABS é o único centro de investigação 100% privado (sem ligação a nenhuma instituição pública) na área de ICT (o painel de Electrical and Computer Engineering + o painel de Computer Science and Information Technologies da FCT) com financiamento estratégico da FCT . Na última avaliação da FCT em 2018 o COPELABS teve a classificação de BOM. As condições financeiras comparáveis às da função pública.

Os potenciais candidatos devem enviar uma carta de motivação, C.H e C.V. para: beko.marko@ulusofona.pt

In 2019 Copelabs members produced 82 publications in peer-reviewed international journals and/or conference proceedings, out of which 19 are Q1 (Scimago quartile) journals and 15 are Q2 journals.

1. Pedro Sá Costa, Architecture and communication systems for autonomous vehicles,

Recent traffic accidents involving autonomous vehicles cause great concern regarding safety and reliability in autonomous driving. These facts encourage research to improve the efficiency of the perception systems of these vehicles. Perception refers to the ability of an autonomous vehicle to collect information and extract relevant knowledge from the environment. In turn, cooperative perception is the sharing of local perception information with other vehicles or infrastructure through wireless communications. This cooperation impacts decision making and driving planning for increased reliability, safety, and reduced road congestion. In this proposal, we intend to elaborate a computational perception system for autonomous vehicles based on the cooperation capable of complementing the current systems to increase the confidence and safety for autonomous driving. This novel perception system will allow to detect moving and stationary objects to generate an obstacle map of a given geographical area. The combination of the local and remote information will give vehicles a more efficient perception system. This system cooperation will result from the data exchange between vehicles, and mobile edge computing infrastructure.

2.Milos Stankovic, Decentralized Cooperative Learning and Control for Networked Dynamical Systems

The subject of the proposal belongs to the emerging area of Intelligent Networked Cyber-Physical Systems (INCPS) dealing with complex, spatially distributed and networked heterogeneous multi-agent dynamical systems, representing one of the greatest challenges in modern science and technology. The impacts of INCPS will be ground-breaking, revolutionary and pervasive; this is evident today in emerging applications such as swarms of autonomous vehicles, smart buildings, cities and power grids, intelligent agriculture, transportation and manufacturing systems. Dimensionality, uncertainty, potential vulnerability, and information structure constraints, as fundamental characteristics of these systems, have led to the development of the decentralized decision making theory, providing scalability and robustness to structural uncertainties. However, high level of decentralization may increase vulnerability and decrease performance of the overall system. The general objective of the project is development of new methods, algorithms and practical tools for decentralized learning and intelligent control for resilient INCPS, based on applications of consensus techniques, robust statistics theory, game theory and reinforcement learning. More specifically the objectives are: 1) Development of decentralized and distributed estimation algorithms, for resilient cooperative learning in INCPS; and 2) Development of novel decentralized algorithms for cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning control. Besides the short-term (1 year) expected results, the formulated objectives should also be considered in a long-term sense, having in mind the complexity, interdisciplinarity and generality of the approach.

3. Slavisa Tomic, Distributed Secure Localization

The fifth generation (5G) of networks is expected to provide significantly higher bandwidth and faster data rates with potential for interconnecting myriads of heterogeneous devices (sensors, agents, users, machines, and vehicles) into a single network (of nodes), under the notion of Internet of Things. The ability to accurately determine the physical location of each node (stationary or moving) will permit rapid development of new services and enhancement of the entire system. In many outdoor environments, this could be achieved by employing global navigation satellite system (GNSS) which offers worldwide service coverage with good accuracy. However, installing a GNSS receiver on each device in a network with thousands of nodes would be very expensive in addition to energy constraints. Besides, in indoor or obstructed environments (e.g., dense urban areas, forests, and canyons) the functionality of GNSS is limited to non-existing, and alternative methods have to be adopted. Many of the existing alternative solutions are centralized, meaning that there is a sink in the network that gathers all information and executes all required computations. This approach quickly becomes cumbersome as the number of nodes in the network grows, creating bottle-necks near the sink and high computational burden. Therefore, more effective approaches are needed. As such, this project aims at developing novel distributed solutions for target localization in large-scale networks, in which nodes have restricted energy resources. Besides guaranteeing good localization performance (both in terms of localization accuracy and computational complexity), the main goal of the project will be to provide secure solutions (localization in malicious environments, i.e., in the presence of one or more internal/external attackers whose objective is to impede our fundamental desire to achieving high accuracy). This malicious setting raises the bar even higher in terms of difficulty of the problem, but is of paramount importance in many practical applications.

In the 2018 FCT Individual Call to Scientific Employment Stimulus Copelabs has been awarded 1 Assistant Researcher position.

10.2019: Dr. Many Afonso, from  Biometris group, Wageningen University and Research, The Netherlands, visited COPELABS on October 27th 2019, and interacted with the resident researchers and PhD students.

09.2019: Dr. Marko Vukolic, from IBM Zurique and a member of Blockchain Security & Applications Group, visited COPELABS on September 27th 2019, and interacted with the resident researchers Marko Beko. Pedro Sá Costa and José Faisca.

Some of the new research topics in 2020 are: distributed reinforcement learning, massive MIMO, variational inference and big data, compressive sensing, grant-free random access protocols for 5G and beyond.

Prof. Sanja Vranjes, Prof. Joel Rodrigues and Prof. Marco di Renzo  accepted the invitation to serve on the External Advisory Board for Copelabs. 

In 2018 Copelabs members produced 71 publications in peer-reviewed international journals and/or conference proceedings, out of which 16 are Q1 (Scimago quartile) journals and 10 are Q2 journals.

Copelabs was awarded the classification of "Good" by the international review panel appointed by the Portuguese Science Foundation (FCT),  in the last evaluation exercise launched in 2018. Copelabs will receive around 200k € for the period 2020-2023. This means that Copelabs is the only 100% private institution (with no connection/partnership to public Universities) in the areas of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering  that will receive the FCT strategic funding.

22.05.2019: Prof. Marko Beko was elected Principal Researcher on the meeting of Scientific Council of Copelabs held on May 22nd 2019

03.2019: Prof. Dr. Christian Rothenberg, from University of Campinas and head of the INTRIG (Information & Networking Technologies Research & Innovation Group) visited COPELABS on March 3rd 2019, and interacted with the resident researchers and PhD students.

Since August 2013, Christian Esteve Rothenberg is Assistant Professor at University of Campinas (UNICAMP), where he received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2010. From 2010 to 2013, he worked as Senior Research Scientist in the areas of IP systems and networking at CPqD R&D Center in Telecommunications, Campinas, Brazil.

During his PhD, he worked on probabilistic data structures applied to packet forwarding in content-centric networks, was a visiting researcher (2008) at Ericsson Research Nomadic Lab, Jorvas, Finland, and contributed to the EU FP7 Publish/Subscribe Internet Routing Paradigm (PSIRP) project.
He holds the Telecommunication Engineering degree from the Technical University of Madrid (ETSIT - UPM), Spain, and the M.Sc. (Dipl. Ing.) degree in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from the Darmstadt University of Technology (TUD), Germany, 2006. During his master thesis at Deutsche Telekom he worked on IMS-based fixed mobile convergence and mobility management, and was engaged in R&D activities on converged access networks (ScaleNet) and self-optimizing radio access networks. He was an Open Networking Foundation (ONF) Research Associate, co-chair of the IEEE SDN Outreach Committee initiative, and member of the CPqD Innovation Committee.
Christian has two international patents and over 100 publications, including scientific journals and top-tier networking conferences such as SIGCOMM and INFOCOM.

03.2019: COPELABS hosted PhD students Daniel Silva, Liliana Inocêncio Carvalho and Godwin Anwork Asamooning participated in the NetSys 2019 PhD Forum, by presenting the status of their PhD studies.

The Conference on Networked Systems (NetSys 2019) provides an international forum for engineers and scientists in academia, industry, and government to discuss recent innovations in the realm of networked systems. NetSys is a biennial event that originates from the key scientific conference on networked systems in German-speaking countries KiVS (Kommunikation in Verteilten Systemen) – which was initiated 37 years ago and has international orientation since 2013. NetSys is organized by the special interest group “Communication and Distributed Systems” (KUVS), which is anchored both in the German Computer Science society (Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI)) and in the Information Technology society (Informationstechnische Gesellschaft im VDE (ITG)).
In 2019, the annual 1-day ITG expert symposium “Future of Networking” (Zukunft der Netze, ZdN) organized on an invitation only basis will be an integral part of the conference

02.2019: ACM TOIT Special Issue on the Evolution of IoT Network Architectures.

To support the sheer number of entities connecting to the /Internet of Things (IoT)/, emerging IoT networks must support the stewardship of
large amounts of data, in-network and in-flight computation/AI, distributed storage, and rich queries. While today's IoT uses standard IP-based messaging, its shortcomings have led to proposed extensions for constrained environment operation, publish-subscribe middleware,
data-centric routing, among other technologies. This special issue aims to present the most leading-edge research on:
- Next-generation IoT network architecture & protocols*, including improved support for QoS/QoE, increased mobility, streaming media, and integrated security; a path from client/server centralized models to a fully distributed comms architecture; edge data producer disruption.
- Cross-layer design*, enabling real-time & near-real-time data delivery and synchronization; support for efficient multi-party communication; collective behaviors (e.g., crowd sensing, crowdsourcing, resource federation); impacting low-power design; the wireless & mobile edge.
- Novel approaches to Edge networking for IoT*, such as distribution & orchestration of network functions to best support data processing
and aggregation; seamless interoperation of static and mobile edge infrastructure & devices; resilience and dynamic adaptation; data caching and migration; autonomous operation vs opportunistic connectivity; the proliferation and peering of "edges".
IoT communication interoperability*, such as proposals to articulate in a distributed and self-organizing way communication between different communication protocols; support for a large variety of heterogeneous and constrained devices; discovery & directory services.
- Network measurement & performance*, to assist in understanding, exposing and comparing the performance of current IoT resources, infrastructure and protocols in a variety of scenarios, including industrial & consumer IoT.
- IoT Privacy, security and trust challenges*, including data security, user privacy, distributed trust models, attestation, privacy- and policy-preservation, encrypted search, access control and policy management.

Guest Editors
Rute C. Sofia (mailto:rute.sofia@ulusofona.pt), COPELABS, University
Lusofona
Eve M. Schooler (mailto:eve.m.schooler@intel.com), Intel
Chris Winkler (mailto:chris.winkler@siemens.com), Siemens AG
Dirk Kutscher (mailto:ietf@dkutscher.net), University of Applied
Sciences Emden/Leer

*Submission*

Refer to: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/toit

Please select "Special Issue on Evolution of IoT Networking
Architectures" in the TOIT Manuscript Central Website

*Deadlines*

Submissions: June 30, 2019
First decisions: October 15, 2019
Revisions: November 11, 2019
Final decisions: January 31, 2020
Final (Camera-ready): February 29, 2020
Publication: May 2020

11.2018: COPELABS congratulates Dr. Rute C. Sofia for becoming an Associate Editor of IEEE Access, for the period of 2018 to 2023.

IEEE Access is an award-winning, multidisciplinary, all-electronic archival journal, continuously presenting the results of original research or development across all of IEEE’s fields of interest. Supported by author publication fees, its hallmarks are a rapid peer review and publication process with open access to all readers. IEEE Access has an impact factor of 3.557, an Eigenfactor of 0.0186, and an article influence score of 1.098 (per 2017 JCR).

The IEEE Access Associate Editors are responsible for ensuring that the publication maintains the highest quality while adhering to the publication policies and procedures of IEEE.

11.2018: Within the context of the concursal procedure 2018 concerning hiring of one PhD researcher in accordance with "artigo 19º do Decreto-Lei nº 57/2016, de 29 de agosto", changed by law  "57/2017, de 19 de julho", and within the "contrato-programa entre a FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P. e a COFAC -Cooperativa de Animação e Formação Cultural crl", Dr. Pedro Sá Costa has been selected for the position CEEC/COPELABS/JUNIOR2018, category of "Junior Researcher".

The selection procedure, candidates that applied as well as juri deliberation is available here.

10.2018: Rute C. Sofia, Senior Researcher of COPELABS and Associate Professor at Universidade Lusófona has been named Senior Member of the IEEE. Dr. Sofia's research interests are focused on network architectures and protocols, with special emphasis in mobility management and modeling; IoT; pervasive wireless systems.

09.2018, G. Asaamoning, P. Mendes, A Study for a Name-based Coordination of Autonomic IoT Functions. inProc. IEEE WiMob/MobiEdge 2018, Sep. 2018.

09.2018, P. Mendes, R. Sofia, V. Tsaoussidis, S. Diamantopoulos, J. Soares,Information-centric routing for opportunistic wireless networks. InProc. ACM ICN 2018, Sep. 2018.

 This poster describes DABBER, a protocol developed to extend the reach of Named Data Networking into wireless environments. Our key contribution lies in the fact that DABBER supports communication in op-portunistic wireless environments by relying on routing metrics that take into consideration node availability and centrality measures; data reachability metrics. The poster provides an overview to the DABBER architecture , and to the available open-source implementation.

07.2018: COPELABS researchers participated in Ciência 2018 from July 2nd to July 4th. In addition to the regular stand, COPELABS presented a talk in the Smart Cities/Cidades Inteligentes Session (15h30m, July 4th), "People-to-people Communication in Emergency Scenarios", by P. Mendes, R. Sofia, J. Soares, M. Tavares, O. Aponte.

The H2020 UMOBILE opportunistic wireless communication has also been shown during July 4th, Pavillion 5, demos, via a demonstration of communication with intermittent Internet access, supported by the COPELABS application Oi! and by the novel routing protocol DABBER. These contributions have been developed by COPELABS in the H2020 UMOBILE project, grant number 645124.