Introduction

Since 1996, the Portuguese research institutes and centers of all areas of knowledge, based at higher education or private nonprofit institutions, are subjected to periodic assessments by international evaluation panels. These evaluation exercises are organized under the responsibility of the national research council, namely the Science and Technology Foundation (FCT).

By law, the state can award the statute of “Associated Laboratory” to institutions of high scientific-technological merit which are recognized as important actors to the national scientific and technological policy. The “Associated Laboratories” sign a special contract with FCT committing them to pursue a midterm strategy along a small number of strategic lines of thrust, to adopt appropriate organizational and management structures, and to follow special human resources policies for recruitment and training of researchers, for which they receive a reinforcement of programmatic funding from FCT. Presently, four of the research institutes in ICT are Associated Laboratories.

We provide below the Internet home pages in English and the corresponding addresses for the research institutes and research centers in the area of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) which were rated in the last assessment as “Excellent” or Very Good” by international standards. The evaluation panel for the area of ICT in the assessment exercise of 2002 was the following:

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Research Institutes and Research Centers

Associated Laboratories
	INESC Porto - Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering of Porto
	ISR Lisbon - Institute of Systems and Robotics, Lisbon
	IT - Institute of Telecommunications
	INESC ID - Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering: Research and Development

Other Research Institutes or Centers
	IPP-HURRAY – Polytechnic Institute of Porto HUgging Real-time and Reliable Architectures for computing sYstems
	ALGORITMI Center
	CENTRIA – Artificial Intelligence Center
	CISUC – Center for Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra
	CITI – Centre of Informatics and Information Technology
	GECAD – Knowledge Engineering and Decision Support Group
	IEETA - Institute of Electronics and Telematics Engineering of Aveiro
	INESC Coimbra – Institute for Systems and Computers Engineering, Coimbra
	ISR Coimbra - Institute of Systems and Robotics, Coimbra
	ISR Porto - Institute of Systems and Robotics, Porto
	LASIGE - Large-Scale Informatics Systems Laboratory
	LIACC - Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science Laboratory
	Optoelectronics at the University of Algarve