University Lusófona has created in September 2013 a new R&D unit, an interdisciplinary unit that is the product of interaction between SITILABS and the former unit CEPCA. The new R&D unit, COPELABS - R&D in Cognitive and People-centric Computing, has as vision to improve the day-to-day living and the well-being of citizens, based on an interdisciplinary approach that conceives and develops technology from a people-centric perspective.

This vision is to be built with an interdisciplinary know-how, that integrates social psychologists, experimental psychologists, as well as computer and informatics scientists.

In terms of organization COPELABS inherits the features of SITILABS, and is a private non-profit association founded by COFAC c.r.l.

The SITILABS to COPELABS transition is expected to be complete by the end of October 2013.

On September 25th and 26th 2013, the 3 international experts of the SITILABS Scientific Advisory Board, Dr. Christophe Diot, Prof. Dr. Roch Guérin, and Mr. Peter Gits, and 2 elements of the SITILABS Socio-economic council - Dr. Álvaro Carvalho, Mr. DIamantino Costa, have visited SITILABS to do a first assessment of the work developed between 2010 and 2012. The visit comprised an overview of results achieved, provided by the Direction elements Rute Sofia and Paulo Mendes, as well as a perspective of the future COPELABS.

The two advisory boards visited the unit, and had also access to technological demonstrations concerning the technology that the units has developed since its inception in University Lusófona.

The two evaluation reports will be publicly available until the end of November 2013.

SITILABS has recently submitted three European IPRs, one of which is shared with University of Kent.

A first IPR relates with relaying mechanisms for wireless networks, having in mind to take advantage of inference by considering neighboring nodes of a source as helpers towards a destination. A second IPR relate with roaming tracking and estimation techniques, while the third IPR relates with a novel, backward mechanism, compatible with the current 802.11 standards,  which assists downstream multi-user communication.

These first IPRs correspond to an effort that the unit is developing in the context of technology transfer to preferred partners, and have been developed in the context of the European project ULOOP - User-centric Wireless Local Loop.

The European projet EU IST FP7 ULOOP - User-centric Wireless Local Loop (2010-2013) has provided a technological demonstration in Infocom 2013, explaining how the trust management framework provided in ULOOP, which has been currently developed to run both in open-source Access Points (OpenWRT) and in Android.

The demo went over the novel process of association to wireless hotspots, based on a mobile token - the ULOOP crypto-id - which unique identifies the source of the communication in shared Internet services, explaining also how ULOOP envisions trust management to achieve security in a flexible way, based on a distributed trust scheme with roots on social trust.