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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Funding:

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

Website:

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

Website:

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

Website:

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

Website:

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

Funding:

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

The asbestos industry started operation in the late 1870s. The first accounts of severe respiratory disease in its workers were published in England (1898, 1906), France (1907) and Italy (1908). Regulations for exposure to Asbestos were introduced about a hundred of years ago in order to reduce incidence of asbestosis and malignant tumours.The PORPARDET project addressed the exposure of demolition workers to asbestos particles with the aid of two new products. These products were designed, manufactured, distributed and serviced by the SME partners within the project. The SMEs along with the research institute partners were responsible for the manufacture, supply of the optics, filter system, detector system, image capture software and final assembly of the full system. A number of partners used the test equipment to service a range of end users, most of which are also SMEs. The portable detection devices will find a ready market world-wide which will continue to grow as developing countries tackle the asbestos danger.

Duration: 1/12/2008-30/11/2010

Website: http://www.porpardet.org

Funding: EC, FP7 for SMEs

Project CoReflect (Title: Digital support for Inquiry, Collaboration, and Reflection on Socio-Scientific Debates) is a three year (2008-2011) research program, funded by the European Commission, under the FP7 Science in Society program. Bringing together eight diverse and multi-disciplinary teams from seven European states, the project members promoted evidence-based practice in science teaching and learning, by collaborating to iteratively design, enact, critique, and validate problem-based innovative inquiry learning environments. These environments, which are being hosted on the STOCHASMOS web-based teaching and learning platform, couple data-rich scientific rigor with the flexibility and easy modifiability that is needed for widespread adoption and use by teachers.

Partners: Cyprus, Germany, Greece, Israel, Netherlands, Sweden, U.K.

Duration: 2008-2011

Website: www.coreflect.org

Funding: European Commission, Science-in-Society program, Seventh Framework Programme (FP7)

The POSEIDON project aim to develop an intelligent cost monitoring system using camera array and sensor networks. It is based on a three level architecture consisting of the following subsystems: (1) a Centralized Monitoring System, (2) an Onshore unit (Autonomous fusion and data processing unit), an (3) an Offshore unit (sensor network on a buoy). Raw data collected from the sensors are used either autonomously (e.g., use of hydrophones) to provide information about any sea craft getting close to the coast or as an additional input to the onshore units (cameras) to efficiently process the video streams irrespectively of weather situations (wind, humidity,  lighting conditions etc). In case of a possible intrusion is detected the onshore units send the video streams of the nearest cameras to the the Centralized Monitoring System for a closer inspection of a human operator and for deciding any actions that are required.

Project Leader: Nicolas Tsapatsoulis (CUT)

Website: http://www.poseidonproject.eu/

CUT Principal Investigator: Nicolas Tsapatsoulis

CUT Co-Investigators: Andreas Lanitis

Duration: 1/7/2011-30/6/2013

Website: http://www.poseidonproject.eu/

Funding: EC, Cross Region Cooperation: Greece-Cyprus 2007-2011

PROFILES is a European project comprised of 22 partners  from 20 countries, among which the Cyprus University of Technology. It is a four year research program (2010-2014). The aim of the PROFILES project is to promote reflection-oriented teaching as a means to enhance students’ scientific literacy. Emphasis is given on raising the self-efficacy of science teachers in order to put into practice more effective ways of teaching students. The project’s innovation is to implement existing, exemplary, context-led, Inquiry-Based Science Education (IBSE) focused, science teaching materials through working with ‘teacher partnerships’. The PROFILES project intends to improve science education by offering innovative scientific learning opportunities to pre- and in-service teachers, teacher educators as well as students within school and non-formal education centres.

Project leader at CUT: Eleni A. Kyza

Partners: Austria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, U.K.

Duration: 2010-2014

Website: www.cut.ac.cy/profiles, www.profiles-project.eu

Funding: European Commission, Science-in-Society program, Seventh Framework Programme (FP7)

Project leader at CUT: Eleni A. Kyza

Partners: Austria, Cyprus, Estonia, France, Hungary, Israel, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, U.K.

Duration: 2013-2017

Website: www.parrise.eu

Funding: € 135.168,00

COHESIFY aims to assess the contribution of Cohesion policy to citizens’ identification with the EU and produce a new strategy to communicate EU Cohesion policy to citizens. The goal is to assess how and to what extent EU Cohesion policy affects citizens’ perceptions of and identification with the European Union. The project focuses on three inter-related issues: (1) the identity(ies)of people in EU regions in EU, national, regional and local contexts; (2) the governance, communication and impacts of Cohesion policy, including citizens’ perceptions of the policy and identification with the EU, and (3) what is needed to make Cohesion policy more effective in terms of people’s perceptions of the policy and the EU more generally. A mixed-methods design is adopted to study the relationship between Cohesion policy, policy performance and attitudes to the EU, distinguishing between different levels of governance and types of actors-from those involved in programme design and implementation to final beneficiaries and the wider public. The communication channels of Cohesion policy influence are examined, distinguishing between public communication and political and social communication.
Call: H2020-REFLECTIVE-SOCIETY-2015

Duration: 01/02/2016-03/04/2018

Website: http://www.cohesify.eu/

Funding: