V-EUPNEA
Living, Breathing Virtual Worlds

Dr. Panayiotis Charalambous is the team leader of the V-EUPNEA MRG of CYENS Centre of Excellence since June 2019. He was a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Cyprus during the academic year 2018-2019. Between 2016-2018, he worked as both an Associate Research Scientist and a Computational Scientist at the CaSToRC centre of the Cyprus Institute; there he worked on the crossroads of Computational Sciences and the Cultural Heritage communities. Between 2014-2016 he was a post-doctoral fellow at INRIA Rennes, France under the supervision of Dr. Julien Pettre where he worked on the development of novel algorithms for the authoring and simulation of human crowds. In 2014 he completed his PhD from the University of Cyprus under the supervision of Prof. Yiorgos Chrysanthou where he worked on the development of novel data-driven algorithms for Virtual Crowds. He got his BSc in Computer Science and Telecommunications from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece in 2002 and his MSc in Advanced Systems Technologies in 2005 from the same university. Dr. Charalambous worked as a researcher and engineer on several projects funded by Horizon 2020, RPF and other agencies. He is a member of the ACM, the Eurographics association and has served as a reviewer of several prestigious journals and conferences. Reviewer credits include journals such as ACM’s Transactions on Graphics, Computer Graphics Forum, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics and conferences such as Eurographics, Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA), Motion Interaction and Games (MIG) and CASA.

Dr. Stela Makri completed her PhD studies (2019) at the Warwick Centre for Predictive Modelling, School of Engineering of the University of Warwick working in the area of multiscale materials modelling. In 2015 she received her MSc in Scientific Computing from the same university. She was awarded her BA in Mathematics at the University of Cambridge in 2014. Her research interests include numerical optimization, machine learning and data analysis, mathematical modelling of dynamical systems and multiscale modelling.

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Dr Maria Paschali is the art historian specialist at national level for the European-funded research project EHEM. She has worked, inter alia, with the Royal Academy of Arts, United Nations Development Programme, the University of Bologna and the Open University of Cyprus. She was awarded her MA and PhD in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London). Previously she obtained an MA in Museum Studies (University of Newcastle) and a BA in History and Archaeology, with a specialisation in Archaeology and History of Art (University of Athens). Key themes in her research centre on the challenges in digitising and curating the Middle Ages as well as on the uses of visual imagery, more traditionally associated with Byzantine, Islamic and Gothic art, in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Andreas Panayiotou is currently a PhD Student of Computer Science at the University of Cyprus. In 2022, he was awarded his M.Sc in Computer Science from University of Cyprus, where in his thesis proposed reinforcement learning methods to simulate heterogeneous human crowd behaviors. In 2021 he received a B.Sc in Computer Science from the same university. His research interests include crowd simulation, machine learning for computer graphics, virtual environments, and computer games technologies.

Theodoros Kyriakou is Ph.D. student in Character Animation at the University of Cyprus, Department of Computer Science. He has also obtained his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Computer Science from the same University. His research interests include character animation, crowd simulation, machine learning for computer graphics, virtual environments, and computer games technologies.

Christina-Georgia Serghides received her MEng Degree in Design Engineering, from Imperial College London in 2022. She initially carried out a six-month internship placement at CYENS Centre of Excellence. Her work involved highly innovative R&D, aiming at the integration and application of the Microsoft HoloLens 2 and Azure Kinect within Mixed Reality environments. Christina is currently working as a Research Associate at CYENS in the V-EUPNEA MRG, while she is also pursuing a PhD at the University of Cyprus. Her research interests focus in the area of VR, AR and MR and their novel applications, enhanced with real-time, realistic virtual human interaction, through the use of state-of-the-art hardware and algorithms.

Marios is currently persuing his Master of Science in Advanced Information Technologies, at the University of Cyprus. He received his B.Sc. in Computer Science at the University of Cyprus in 2021. His research interests include Computer Graphics and Computer Games Technologies.

Marilena Lemonari is a second-year PhD student of Computer Science at the University of Cyprus (UCY) under CLIPE, a Horizon Marie-Curie ITN project. Before that, she was awarded her MSc in Machine Learning from UCL (2020). In 2019, she received her BSc in Mathematics from the University of Nottingham. Recently, she has completed her 3-month secondment at Inria as a research guest, during which, she has worked on intuitive control for characters and small groups. As an Early-Stage Researcher (ESR) for CLIPE, her research interests revolve around crowd control and authoring, machine learning for computer graphics and behavioural crowd simulation.

Eleni Evripidou is currently an MSc student in Computer Science at the University of Cyprus. In previous years, she had received a BSc in Physics from the University of Cyprus and an MSc in Theoretical Physics from the University of Edinburgh. Her interests include computer graphics, game development and computer animation. During her internship she uses Machine Learning techniques for crowds in collaborative tasks.