UNIC – AILab – University of Nicosia – Artificial Intelligence Lab
Country Cyprus
Website UNIC: www.unic.ac.cy
AILab: ailab.unic.ac.cy
UNIC
The University of Nicosia (UNIC) is the largest university in Cyprus with over 7000 students. It is an independent, coeducational, equal opportunity institution of higher education, which offers a wide range of programmes to students from around the world. The University through its five Schools, offers 40 Bachelor degrees, 32 Master degrees and 11 doctoral programmes in business, science, medicine, education and the liberal arts. International in philosophy, the University hosts students from all over the world, in a multicultural learning environment, promoting friendship, cooperation, and understanding.
The University pursues excellence in education through research and high teaching standards, in a continually improving academic environment. University of Nicosia features 26 research centres focusing on global and local issues including health, complex networks, social organization, education, ICT, engineering, and environmental sustainability. Researchers at the University are interested in examining challenges to modern life from a wide range of perspectives, including technological and scientific advances, modern culture and thought, and apply their expertise derived from addressing local, regional and national issues to global challenges and develop teams to bring disciplinary strengths together to approach key issues with global impact.
The University, through its participation either as partner or coordinator, has developed a wide base of knowledge and expertise both from the academic and research point of view but also from the project management aspect UNIC has been involved in several basic research and R&D projects both as coordinators and as partners. The knowledge and expertise of the Faculty, the state of the infrastructure and the administrative support, guarantee the successful completion of this work.
AILab
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (ailab.unic.ac.cy): The AI Lab of the University of Nicosia aims at developing cutting edge technology as well as state-of-the art research on the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning, and Data Science. It consists of professors, Post-Doctoral researchers, PhD Students, as well as undergraduate students that conduct research and run projects related to a plethora of challenging topics like: Data Science (Data Stream mining, Deep Learning), Artificial Intelligence (Machine Learning, Uncertain Reasoning, Bayesian Networks), Smart Cities (Learning from Urban Data), Computational Social Science, Sentiment Analysis, Social Network Analysis.
The team focuses on interdisciplinary topics working with external collaborators from Political Science, Social Science, Journalism and Health. On top of the research goals the group provides high-quality teaching on relevant topics (e.g. Artificial Intelligence, Data Mining, Machine Learning). The directors of the lab are Ioannis Katakis and Athena Stassopoulou, both professors at the Computer Science department, University of Nicosia.
Ioannis Katakis
Associate Professor
Dr Ioannis Katakis is an Associate Professor, co-founder and co-director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Computer Science Department of the University of Nicosia. He served multiple universities as a lecturer and a senior researcher. Dr Katakis was included in the J. Ioannides’ (Stanford University) list of top young Greek scientists based on the impact of their work. His research has been cited more than 7200 times by the scientific community. He published more than 50 papers in international conferences and scientific journals, organized workshops and special issues. He is an Editor at the journals `Information Systems’ and `Online Social Networks and Media’. Dr Katakis has extensive experience in European research projects where he participated as a Quality Assurance Coordinator and a Senior Researcher. His research interests include data science, machine learning, sentiment analysis, mining smart city data, social networks and computational social science.
Athena Stassopoulou
Professor
Dr. Athena Stassopoulou is a Professor and Head of the Department of Computer Science, University of Nicosia. She holds a BSc in Computer Science and Mathematics (joint honors) from the University of Manchester, UK (1992) and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence, from the University of Surrey, Centre for Vision Speech and Signal Processing, UK (1996). Dr. Stassopoulou worked as a Post-Doctoral Researcher and as a Senior Research Associate at the Center for Mapping (NASA Commercial Space Center), The Ohio State University, USA. She has over 24 years of research experience and has worked in projects funded by NASA (Image Understanding Initiative), the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) in the USA, the European Union and the Research Promotion Foundation of Cyprus. She has also served as an External Evaluator of research proposals submitted to the European Union and as a Scientific Reviewer in projects of the Information Society and Technology (IST) Programme of the European Union. Dr. Stassopoulou has been publishing in international refereed journals and conferences in the following areas which constitute her research interests: uncertain reasoning, Bayesian Networks, Geographic Information Systems, Computer Vision and Image Understanding, Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Artificial Intelligence Applications for the Web and in Medicine.
Demetris Trihinas
Lecturer
Dr. Demetris Trihinas is a Lecturer at the Department of Computer Science, University of Nicosia and member of the Artificial Intelligence Lab. His research interests include, with particular focus in Big Data Management, Data Visualization and Data Mining, over Cloud, IoT and Edge Computing topologies. His PhD dissertation targeted developing low-cost probabilistic and adaptive learning models for approximate monitoring in order to improve energy efficiency and reduce both the volume and velocity of data generated and consumed by IoT services offered through the cloud. For the research conducted during his doctoral studies, he was selected by the Heidelberg Laureate Forum as one of the 100 young promising researchers in Computer Science for 2015. He additionally holds a Computer Science MSc from the University of Cyprus and a Dipl-Ing in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). Dr Trihinas has extensive experience in European research and innovation projects where he has participated as a Work Package Leader and Researcher in multiple projects (e.g., Unicorn H2020, PaaSport FP7, CELAR FP7) funded under the European Commission FP7 and H2020 schemes. Additionally, he is the developer of the JCatascopia cloud monitoring system, the AdaM framework for IoT devices and also an active member of the Eclipse Foundation Cloud Application Management Framework (CAMF). His work is published in IEEE/ACM journals and conferences such as Trans. Services Computing (TSC), Trans. Cloud Computing (TCC), ICDCS, INFOCOM, BigData, CCGrid, CloudCom and ICSOC.
Vangelis Mathioudis
Researcher
Vangelis Mathioudis is a student on MSc in Data Science from University of Nicosia and an intern Researcher at Artificial Intelligence Lab. He holds a Bachelor Degree in Physics, from University of Patras. His interests on Data Science include Natural Language Processing and Understanding, Task Oriented Chatbots and Reinforcement Learning.