To design, plan, deploy and operate, an Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) system often comprehends the integration of several scientific areas. The Architectures, Algorithms and Platforms for Enhanced Living Environments (AAPELE) COST Action addresses the issues of defining software, hardware and service architectures for AAL, on studying and creating more efficient algorithms for AAL, particularly those related to the processing of large amounts of data and of biosignals in lossy environments, and on the research of protocols for AAL or, with more detail, on studying communication and data transmission protocols for AAL.

Duration: 2013 - 2017

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FUJURE was a research project funded by the Research Committee of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Project Coordinator: Prof. Gregory Paschalidis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece). Its main objectives where to study the attitudes and practices of Greek journalism students regarding news consumption, alternative new media use, as well as professional values and norms. An article presenting the study’s findings is currently under revision.

Duration: 2008-2009

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Funding: € 10.000,00

CENMEP was a research project, part of the COST A30 program, which studied the current state of play for political parties and new media regarding elections in 22 EU countries. The project coordinator was Prof. M. Vergeer, Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands. Within this project, I produced (a) a country report regarding the electoral system, the party system and political campaigning in Cyprus and (b) a database of coded data regarding the features of political parties’ websites prior to the European Parliament elections in June 2009.

Duration: 2009-2010

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The ePark project (http://www.e-park.eu) examined ways of applying Internet of Things technologies to improve urban parking infrastructures. Its results show that sensors, wireless communications and mobile applications can act as enablers for cities to become smarter by assisting drivers in the often cumbersome task of finding an available parking spot and paying for its usage.

Duration: 2011-2013

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Funding: € 215.000,00

“Forensics is the application of a broad spectrum of sciences to answer questions of interest to a legal system. This may be in relation to a crime or a civil action” [Wikipedia]. Since many such questions boil down to identifying, or verifying the identity, of people allegedly involved in some action, a clear relationship exists between forensics and biometrics. Biometrics developed a number of techniques which can clearly facilitate the identification of people involved in criminal actions or civil incidents. Thus, although the two communities have traditionally often operated in relative isolation, there are many scenarios where the synergic cooperation of multimodal biometrics and forensics can be successfully applied. To address such multifaceted areas it is important to develop an interdisciplinary network with complementary competences, to foster the birth of a new community which can develop novel technological solutions to crucial issues and new challenges in forensic science. The Action will promote new partnerships, will provide education and training, will contribute to develop new standards and best practices, will produce awareness of the potential benefits of advanced technologies for evidence analysis in forensic cases and will stimulate improved mutual understanding of collaborative working models linking the academic and industrial sectors.

Duration: 2012-2016

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Funding: € 360.000,00

EUVOX is a state-of-the-art, EU-wide voting advice application (VAA) for the 2014 elections to the European Parliament (http://www.euvox2014.eu). The purpose of EUVOX is to help citizens to select the political party that best matches their own policy preferences and enable them to have quick access to information about the positions of all parties in these crucial elections. The project was designed and implemented by a consortium of researchers based on Kieskompas and PreferenceMatcher, two experienced organizations in the field of VAAs that have designed many such tools across four continents, as well as country teams from all EU member states. In addition, Kieskompas has co-designed EU Profiler, winner of the 2009 eDemocracy award.

Duration: 2014 (January – June)

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Funding: € 30.000,00

Community media have been studied extensively in the past decades, but their role in conflict resolution hardly received any academic attention. Focusing on the divided island of Cyprus, and its community media center (CCMC), established in 2009, the main research question of this project is how the representations of the political and the social, and the organisation of participation by community media can contribute to a shift from antagonism to agonism within the Cypriot public space.

Duration: 2014-2018

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Funding: € 360.000,00

The goal of Econ@Tel is to develop a strategic research, training network among key people/organizations in order to enhance Europe’s competence in the field of telecommunications economics, to support related R&D-initiatives, and to provide guidelines, recommendations to European players (end-users, enterprises, operators, regulators, policy makers, content providers) for the provision of new converged broadband, wireless, content delivery networks to citizens and enterprises.

Econ@Tel coordinates the development of research methodologies, tools from engineering, media, and business research. Regulatory issues helping or hindering the adoption of economically efficient services are identified.

Econ@Tel mobilizes the “critical mass” and diversity of economists, business research experts, engineers, and scientists working in communications and content economics. It is the first cross-disciplinary COST Action tackling jointly these issues. It differentiates itself from engineering-focused projects under EU Frameworks.

The main objective of this Action is to allow business partnering to drive networking services and their sustainable provisioning for consumers and enterprises alike. CUT’s involvement in the project is mainly in the technological aspects of the project.

CUT Principal Investigator: Lambros Lambrinos

Duration: 2007-2011

Website: http://www.cost605.org

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The main objective of this Action is to investigate novel technologies for unsupervised multimodal biometric authentication systems using a new generation of biometricsenabled identity documents and smart cards, while exploring the added-value of these technologies for large-scale applications with respect to European requirements in relation to the storage, transmission, and protection of personal data. The Action will benefit the European community; individual European states; the providers of technology for biometrics, identity documents and smart cards; providers of public and private services; various security organisations wishing to use biometrics authentication for the provision of access to services and confidential information by authorised individuals. Either the challenges ahead are dealt with or the benefits of this aspect of information technology for European countries will be limited. It has become obvious that a specific fundamental research effort is needed in the transdisciplinary domain of adaptation of the state-of-the-art biometric techniques to the real-world environmental conditions and to user behaviour when using identity documents and smart cards.

CUT Principal Investigator:  Nicolas Tsapatsoulis

Duration: 2007-2011

Website: http://www.cost2101.org

Funding:

The aim of this project is the pilot deployment and demonstration of a distributed pool of sharing educational resources for Medical science conforming to international standards, available for use and extension by a network of medical institutions compliant with the appropriate accreditation and intellectual property policies (constrained by the project resources and time-span). The proposed system and its creation and harvesting supporting mechanisms could serve undergraduate, post-graduate and continuing Medical Education institutions through the provision of quality material evaluated from medical experts. The creation of high quality online educational material by higher education institutions and medical associations is often hindered due to the extra development cost, time required and the lack of know-how on international education standards. Increasing growth rates and strengthening innovation capacities through the dissemination of innovative educational activities is necessary to countries seeking cohesion in economic performance and sustainable development. An interactive pool of resources respecting international education standards will serve undergraduate, post-graduate and continuing Medical Education institutions, along with other relevant initiatives, through the provision of quality material evaluated from medical experts.

Main Contractor: University of Cyprus

CUT Principal Investigator: Nicolas Tsapatsoulis

CUT Co-Investigator: Zenonas Theodosiou

Duration: 1/10/2008-31/03/2009

Website: http://www.cs.ucy.ac.cy/widemednet/

Funding: Interreg IIB Archimed