BITS focuses on Bayesian inference techniques, motivated by their state-of-the-art performance, and by their many applications in engineering and computational sciences. Currently available results are a solid foundation to develop the envisaged advancements.
The Fellow is based at KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence under the University of Cyprus, and will also benefit from a secondment at POLIMI.
The University of Cyprus (UCY), serving as the host institution, is the largest public university in Cyprus with more than 7000 students. UCY is not only an endorser of the “European Charter for Researchers” but has also been awarded the “HR Excellence in Research” logo since 2012 – an accreditation given by the European Commission to institutions supporting a stimulating and favourable working environment for researchers. UCY has been raising its international research profile since its establishment in 1989 and is the leading university and the most active research institution in Cyprus, participating in 260 projects, currently running 150 programmes funded by European and international grants and another 115 programmes funded by the National Research Promotion Foundation, with research funding from external sources reaching €40m in 2018.
KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence is the largest research centre of the University of Cyprus in the area of monitoring, control and security of critical infrastructures. It was established in 2008 as a research unit at UCY and has been upgraded to a European Research Center of Excellence through the EU’s strategic Horizon 2020 program for “Spreading Excellence and Widening Participation – Teaming” in collaboration with Imperial College London with a total funding of €40m. The Center collaborates with an extended network of national and international academics, as well as, industrial and governmental organisations via its Innovation Hub to assure maximal interdisciplinary research impact.
Marie Skłodowska Curie Widening Fellow: Yiolanda Englezou is a postdoctoral researcher at KIOS Research and Innovation Centre of Excellence, University of Cyprus since 2018. In 2020 she was awarded a prestigious Marie Skłodowska Curie (MSCA) Widening Fellowship to work with Professors Christos Panayiotou and Stelios Timotheou on the project “BITS”. She received her PhD in Statistics from the University of Southampton in 2018. Her research was within the field of design of experiments, focussing on the development of methods for designing experiments for the calibration of physical and computational models, for example models derived from underlying scientific knowledge. A key issue when using these models is possible systematic differences between the output of the model and the observed physical process. Hence, when designing experiments to calibrate physical models, account must be taken of such possible discrepancies in order to enable effective and accurate uncertainty quantification. She developed a general framework for designing the physical experiments when the model requires a computationally expensive numerical implementation. The work was funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and, for a time, the UK Atomic Weapon Establishment. She has also completed a degree in Applied Mathematics and Physical Sciences from the National Technical University of Athens in 2014, where she studied Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science, specialising in the areas of Applied Mathematics and Statistics.
Host Supervisor: Christos Panayiotou is a Professor with the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at UCY. He is also the Deputy Director of the KIOS CoE for which he is also a founding member. Christos has received a B.Sc. and Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in 1994 and 1999 respectively. His research interests include distributed and intelligent control systems, ad hoc and sensor networks, fault diagnosis, optimization and control of cyber-physical systems, resource allocation, transportation networks and intelligent buildings. Christos has supervised 7 PhD students who currently hold positions in academia and startup companies while he is currently supervising 7 PhD students and 6 post-doctoral researchers. He has participated in more than 30 research projects as principal investigator or coordinator funded by European and National agencies with total budget in excess of 45 million euros. He has published more than 200 papers in international refereed journals and conferences and is the recipient of the 2014 Best Paper Award for the Journal Building and Environment (Elsevier). He is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation, the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, the Conference Editorial Board of the IEEE Control Systems Society, the Journal of Discrete Event Dynamical Systems and the European Journal of Control. He held several positions in organizing committees and technical program committees of numerous international conferences. He has also served as Chair of various subcommittees of the Education Committee of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society.
Secondment Supervisor: Cesare Alippi received the degree in electronic engineering cum laude in 1990 and the PhD in 1995 from Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Currently, he is a Professor with the Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy and Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Switzerland. Currently, he is a visiting professor at the University of Kobe, Japan, and the University of Guangzhou, China. Alippi is an IEEE Fellow, Member of the Administrative Committee of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, Board of Governors member of the International Neural Network Society, Board of Directors member of the European Neural Network Society, Past Vice-President education of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, past associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Emerging topics in computational intelligence, the IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, the IEEE-Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurements, the IEEE-Transactions on Neural Networks. In 2018 he received IEEE CIS Outstanding Computational Intelligence Magazine Award, the 2016 Gabor award from the International Neural Networks Society and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Outstanding Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems Paper Award; in 2013 the IBM Faculty award; in 2004 the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society Young Engineer Award. Current research activity addresses adaptation and learning in non-stationary environments and Intelligence for embedded and cyber-physical systems. He holds 8 patents, has published one monograph book, 6 edited books and about 200 papers in international journals and conference proceedings.
Advisory Committee:
Stelios Timotheou is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a faculty member at the KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence, of the University of Cyprus. He holds a Dipl.-Ing. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (Summa Cum Laude, 2005) from the National Technical University of Athens, an MSc in Communications and Signal Processing (Distinction, 2006) and a PhD in Intelligent Systems and Networks (2010), both from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering of Imperial College London. In previous appointments, he was a Research Associate at KIOS, a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Cyprus, and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on monitoring, control and optimization of critical infrastructure systems, with emphasis on intelligent transportation systems and communication systems. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, a member of the ACM and a member of the Technical Chamber of Cyprus. He is the recipient of the 2017 ‘Cyprus Young Researcher in Physical Sciences & Engineering’ Award, by the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation.
Marios Polycarpou is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Director of the KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence at the University of Cyprus. He received the B.A degree in Computer Science and the B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering, both from Rice University, USA in 1987, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California, in 1989 and 1992 respectively. His teaching and research interests are in intelligent systems and networks, adaptive and cooperative control systems, computational intelligence, fault diagnosis and distributed agents. Dr. Polycarpou has published more than 300 articles in refereed journals, edited books and refereed conference proceedings, and co-authored 7 books. He is also the holder of 6 patents.Prof. Polycarpou is a Fellow of IEEE and IFAC. He is the recipient of the 2016 IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Award. He received with his co-authors the 2014 Best Paper Award for the journal Building and Environment (Elsevier). Prof. Polycarpou served as the President of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (2012-2013), and as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (2004-2010). He is currently the President of the European Control Association (EUCA). Prof. Polycarpou has participated in more than 60 research projects/grants, funded by several agencies and industry in Europe and the United States, including the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant.