From derelict food market to futuristic Centre of Excellence: inside a Cyprus success story

At the very heart of Nicosia, the capital of the Republic of Cyprus, lies a Centre of Excellence (CYENS) specialising in interactive media, smart systems and emerging technologies. ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT Partially funded by the EU, CYENS employs around 110 people — mostly researchers, developers and technicians — across multidisciplinary research groups, affiliated start-ups and spin-offs. They work across more than 50 projects, mostly European, but also through local, national and industry grants. For example, computer scientist Panayiotis Charalambous´team is using AI-driven tools and augmented and virtual reality technologies to create a variety of visual content. These include interactive urban maps displaying real-time data on traffic, noise, environment and pollution, along with reproductions of historical monuments where access is limited or restricted. “Virtual reality is one of those technologies that can enable different modes of interaction with visual elements”, Charalambous, also a Team Leader at the Centre, explains. “One of the things that can enable you [to do] is to be immersed in an environment that maybe it's difficult for you to go to. Either because it's in a remote location, something in a different country, or maybe you also have mobility issues. Being immersed in that environment allows you to feel like, yes, I'm there, right?”. His team is also developing innovative technologies to allow interactive experiences. One of their recent projects will let children create their own scenarios with actor avatars in a theatre museum. “You can basically give the actors in the scene different emotional temperaments, different actions that they can do and effectively create your own play”, game engineer programmer Ismail Hadjri explains. “There's also the stage designer table where functionally you place the different objects in the space, you tell the actors where they need to go, you put spotlights where they need to be” Another intriguing technology from the Centre is called Senssos, which involves utilising sensors to monitor interactions between body motion and muscles. This could help musicians reduce imbalances in performance, or physiotherapists propose better treatments for their patients. “We have developed our own hardware to replace the commercially available systems with something which is cheaper, easy to install and fast. So, it can be easy for consumers to use this either at home or at jobs during rehabilitation, during training, to enhance performance and for rehabilitation reasons as well”, explains Christos Ioannou, research assistant professor and co-founder of Senssos. The small sensors being tested here are also already helping professional athletes to enhance their performances by measuring real-time cadence, ground contact, heart rate, and many other parameters that could improve their training techniques. “Main applications of the technology is for the athlete to have real-time feedback on when they are running, indoors or outdoors, without having a coach with them, or to analyse the data afterwards alone, with a coach or with a clinician,” explains computer engineer Panayiotis Kyriakou, who is also the CTO & Co-Founder of biomechanics company Darefore. The Centre of Excellence was established with the goal of becoming a regional hub for technology and knowledge transfer. It has now turned into a useful tool to fight against brain drain in Cyprus — a small EU member with highly skilled engineers, researchers and students, claims CYENS´ CEO, Yiorgos Chrysanthou. “Cyprus is a small place, and we cannot really compete with heavy industry or anything else”, he says. “I believe the only way to help the economy and take it forward and move a little bit beyond tourism, which was the main economic driving force for all these years, is to keep this critical mass of talent. And build it and expand it to create an economic activity which relates on technology”. Software engineer Haris Psallidopoulous, for instance, is working to help farmers improve their farming techniques with AI-driven virtual reality apps. “Farmers were really open to the idea of using AI, extended reality and robots, but they didn't know such technology was available to them, which was actually mind-blowing to me because I am in the tech field: I know they exist”, he says. “Farmers should be using technology more because it's a really helpful tool”. Other researchers are developing solutions to help cities better map, identify, quantify, protect and manage their trees and urban green spaces. “We wanted to provide more time to the municipal staff for creative work rather than having to do micro tasks”, explains Penélope Vásquez, project coordinator of the Cyprus Trees Initiative. “It's easier for them to know where they need to go and trim the trees geographically, where they should plant trees because there's something lacking. And also, we combine this platform with other projects that relate to the urban heat island effect, so the rising of temperatures. Now, the municipality will be able to plan with more information and strategically plan to reduce temperatures in the city.” The City of Nicosia is already actively using some of these solutions. The Municipality was a founding partner of the Centre; the mayor himself chairs its Board of Directors. The institution, he claims, is a key socio-economic actor in the city. “We are between Europe, Asia, and Africa. And this is very attractive for people from the wider region to come”, Prountzos says. “The presence of CYENS in Nicosia brings together top-class academics and top-class research together with the municipality, the city, and of course the business community in order to create research that will be used in the sphere of innovation, but also to create applicable solutions.” These solutions are already in use by municipal services, including this platform DumpMapper, a platform that helps track and report illegal landfills, even tiny ones, across the city. “This area is 50 square kilometres, and we have identified through our technology 98 incidents”, Andreas Kamilaris, Managing Director at DumpMapper says while pointing at different points across a map of the city of Nicosia on the computer screen. “Each colour indicates a different type of waste. You can also see a hotspot where most of the waste is located.” As Managing Director for the DeepCamera research group, associate research professor Alessandro Artusi works with his team to develop new image processing, and computer graphics for a variety of applications. DeepCamera focuses on the development of AI-powered vision pipelines that drive real-time detection, tracking, and decision making across complex environments; “from entertainment to maritime safety”, Artusi explains, while sharing a preview alongside his senior research associate, medical physicist Xenios Milidonis. Research associate Charithea Stylianides, a PhD student in Mathematics, also works for CYENS on the application of data science and machine/deep learning on patient data for enhanced diagnosis, prognosis and therapeutic outcomes. Other initiatives promote cultural heritage. Magic Lantern, for example, aims to develop an interactive, augmented-reality-based book designed for museums, galleries, libraries, or archives. The project taps into consumers’ desire to not only witness art and literature, but to connect with it in a more tangible way. “The tangible feeling of an actual physical book provides a different sense and a different engagement for the actual user compared to just touching on a screen”, explains Magic Lantern CEO Fotos Frangoudes. “There are a lot of studies and research behind this that [suggest] more tangible technologies can improve overall learning capacity”, he explains. The Centre has also become a magnet for artists —including Ting-Hun Liu and Leon-Etienne Kühr, who recently experimented with AI’s creative capabilities by asking it to generate its own images without any human prompt. “We all have the feeling that AI images have this own aesthetic quality to them. And we kind of want to distil this, get only this out of it”, the artistic duo explains. “And what happens if these machines only interact with themselves and there's no more human input? And we can see here, it's very mundane pictures of nature, advertising, and politicians.” A recent art festival “FLOWS” co-hosted by the Centre of Excellence gathered the proposals of 60 artists from 15 countries.