Achilleas Achilleos

Frederick University · Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Social media apps such as WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram and Viber are primary communication channels for most people today. Even within these Mainstream Social Media Applications, persons who are deaf are not provided with the rights and means to interact using sign language. This work, an outcome of the research project’ “Accessible System and Soc...

The aging population and the subsequent changing societal structures are foreseen to bring both opportunities and challenges for the economy, services and society at large. Digital exclusion among older people may become less of an issue in the future, as those who have used the Internet in their working and social lives continue to do so as they r...

Вештините како правењето на првиот чекор, првата социјална насмевка и движењето со раката за „чао“ се нарекуваат развојни одредници. Децата доаѓаат до овие одредници во нивната игра, учењето, зборувањето и движењето. Раната идентификацијата на развојни тешкотии е од голема важност за развојот на детето. За да се воспостави систем за ефикасна рана и...

High electricity and water expenditure constitute a significant issue, as recent statistics demonstrate the continuous increase in energy consumption in the European Union (EU). This results in environmental, financial, and social issues. One such major issue is energy poverty. Software tools can influence users’ behavior, enabling them to improve...

Sensor networks that collect data from the environment can be utilized in the development of context-aware applications, bringing into sight the need for data collection, management, and distribution. Boards with microcontrollers, such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi, have gained wide acceptance and are used mainly for educational and research purposes...

The demographic trend causes a rising pressure on health and care systems. Information and communications technology (ICT) provides many appliances that may support older people in prolonging independence while reducing the pressure on health and care systems. Research provides insights into the needs of older people as well as insights into the su...

While the economic impact of major passive sport events is well documented, the contribution of active sports events is scarcely examined. This reflective practice paper contributes towards bridging the gap by examining, in a case study, the economic impact of one of the first big active sport events in Cyprus, organised using the state-of-the-art...

It is widely acknowledged that Major Sport or Mega Sport Events have a huge economic impact and help in promoting sports tourism at the host destination. In fact, many works examine and demonstrate the economic impact of major (passive) sport events, but the importance of active sports events in promoting sports tourism is scarcely examined in the...

The aging population, the increased incidence of chronic disease, the technological advances and the rapidly escalating health-care costs are driving healthcare from hospital and day care centres to home. The GUIDed AAL EU project focuses on the challenge of keeping older adults independent and functioning in their own homes for as long as possible...

Customer recommendations have proved to boost sales, increase customer satisfaction and improve user experience, making recommender systems an important tool for businesses. While recommendations of items such as products or movies, when browsing online, are heavily examined and several recommendation algorithms and systems are developed, still rec...

Abstract Cloud computing offers a flexible pay-as-you-go model for provisioning application resources, which enables applications to scale on-demand based on the current workload. In many cases, though, users face the single vendor lock-in effect, missing opportunities for optimal and adaptive application deployment across multiple clouds. Several...

The huge increase of mobile devices and the advancements of their sensing and computing capabilities have made the mobile crowd a real-time opportunistic data generator. Leveraging crowdsourced data creates new opportunities and challenges in many computing domains. As a result extensible, scalable and inter-operable cloud-based platforms have been...

Scientific and technological innovations have become increasingly important as we face the benefits and challenges of both globalization and a knowledge-based economy. Still, enrolment rates in STEM degrees are low in many European countries and consequently there is a lack of adequately educated workforce in industries. We believe that this can be...

The Internet of Things applies and has a large impact on a multitude of application domains, such as assistive technologies and smart transportation, by bringing together the physical and virtual worlds. Due to the large scale, the extreme heterogeneity and the dynamics of the IoT there are huge challenges for leveraging the IoT within software app...

In this paper, we study the effect of Meta- Lamarckian learning on the performance of a generic hybrid Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithm based on Decomposition (MOEA/D) to solve a well-known combinatorial Multi-Objective Optimization (MOO) problem. We study the hybridization of MOEA/D with a pool of six general-purpose heuristics so as to loca...

Mobile health tracking applications are in abundance over the last years, with applications such as fitness tracking, photo diet tracking for weight loss and diet reporting applications. These applications are used for self-assessment, dynamic feedback and motivation of the users, while some more recent studies revealed that the data from these app...

Cloud computing provides ubiquitous networked access to a shared and virtualised pool of computing capabilities that can be provisioned with minimal management effort. Cloud applications are deployed on cloud infrastructures and delivered as services. The PaaSage project aims to facilitate the modelling and execution of cloud applications by levera...

The Semester of Code initiative organised virtual placements for university students around Europe, working on authentic business problems using open source software. The project was welcomed by stakeholders, and many companies and open source foundations became involved. However, the response from students was disappointing. In this paper we exami...

This deliverable explains the evaluations carried out regarding to the students’ intention to participate in the Semester of Code and VALS project and later the evaluation of the placements performed during the Semester of Code. The three main stakeholders involved performed these evaluations: students, mentors and academic supervisors. Apart of th...

This paper explains the Virtual Alliances for Learning Society (VALS) European Project technological approach to support a virtual placements management process. Also, this paper shows the first results of the practical part of the project, the Semester of Code, explaining the detected problems, the issues, the challenges and some actions to improv...

This deliverable explains the evaluations carried out regarding to the students’ intention to participate in the Semester of Code and VALS project and later the evaluation of the placements performed during the Semester of Code. The three main stakeholders involved performed these evaluations: students, mentors and academic supervisors.Apart of the...

This deliverable explains the evaluations carried out regarding to the students’ intention to participate in the Semester of Code and VALS project and later the evaluation of the placements performed during the Semester of Code. The three main stakeholders involved performed these evaluations: students, mentors and academic supervisors.Apart of the...

Context-aware computing faces many challenges mainly due to the increasing number and heterogeneity of context sources, since the Internet of Things introduces billions of devices. The development of context-aware applications is thus becoming a complex and cumbersome process, which is also augmented by the availability of different mobile platform...

Datasets are used in various applications assisting in performing reasoning and grouping actions on available data (e.g., clustering, classification, recommendations). Such sources of information may contain aspects relevant to context. In order to use to the fullest this context and draw useful conclusions, it is vital to have intelligent techniqu...

This paper explains the Virtual Alliances for Learning Society (VALS) European Project technological approach to support a virtual placements management process. Also this paper shows the first results of the practical part of the project, the Semester of Code, explaining the detected problems, the issues, the challenges and some actions to improve...

The emergence of mobile computing has changed the rules of web application development. Since context-awareness has become almost a necessity in mobile applications, web applications need to adapt to this new reality. A universal development approach for context-aware applications is inherently complex due to the requirement to manage diverse conte...

The placements and internships are one of the main paths to get professional background and some skills for students, especially in areas like informatics and computer sciences. The European-funded VALS project tries to promote the virtual placements and establish a new initiative in virtual placements called Semester of Code. This initiative binds...

VALS has the aims of establishing sustainable methods and processes to build knowledge partnerships between Higher Education and companies to collaborate on resolving authentic business problems through open innovation mediated by the use of Open Source Software. Open Source solutions provide the means whereby educational institutions, students, bu...

A critical contextual modelling issue in context-aware recommender systems research has to do with developing domain and application specific models that offer no reuse and sharing capabilities. Developers and researchers struggle to design their own models without any guidance, often resulting in overspecialized, inefficient and incomplete context...

The social isolation of older adults in Europe is a key and continuously growing issue that demands immediate attention. Older adults might feel isolated and lonely mainly because they lack human contact and social support. This is because their closest relatives, such as their children and grandchildren, live and work at distant places, while cont...

Communication over distance via the use of communication technologies aims to offer and enable contact for older adults, who are typically restricted in terms of mobility and tend to suffer from loneliness due to the lack of social inclusion. Technologies enable communication over distance but suffer greatly in terms of providing the feeling of bei...

The rapid growth of the mobile devices market and the increasing requirements of mobile users augment the need to develop Web Service clients that could be deployed and run on both mobile and desktop devices. Different developers attempt to address this heterogeneity requirement and provide solutions that simplify and automate the development of de...

The rapid growth of the mobile devices market and the increasing requirements of mobile users augment the need to develop Web Service clients that could be deployed and run on both mobile and desktop devices. Different developers attempt to address this heterogeneity requirement and provide solutions that simplify and automate the development of de...

Model matching has been applied to different fields of Model Driven Engineering research and usually concerns models depicting the same information in order to detect their evolution process or elements on which model migration is needed. In the current paper a different approach is followed by comparing models that depend on each other on a more s...

The development of context-aware applications is a complex process that involves the tasks of analysis, design, validation and implementation. This process is typically performed using context modelling approaches that consider context-awareness and apply static context model validation, at the modelling level, using Object Constraint Language rule...

Enterprise Collaboration and Enterprise Interoperability are two key aspects of networked enterprises, which proceed along parallel tracks with rare opportunities to convene, support and influence each other. To resolve this issue we propose the use of the COIN platform, which allows exposure, combination and integration of Web Services to support...

In any form of communication it is vital that both parties can understand the same language, if they cannot a translator is required. Currently mobile users engage the service of a third party provider to translate an SMS text into a different language. The existing services have a number of drawbacks e.g. high cost to the user, not user friendly,...

Context-awareness is gaining wide importance, especially when targeting pervasive environments, whereas Web Services are often exploited as building blocks of context-aware applications because of their interoperability properties. In this framework, Web Services can be used as business services requiring context data for their functionality, but a...

The huge growth of the mobile devices market and the fast-changing requirements of mobile users, increase the need to develop native Web Service clients that can be deployed on both mobile and desktop devices. Existing work attempts to address heterogeneity, in order to simplify the development of device-aware Web Services. This paper defines the P...

The advancements made in terms of the capabilities of mobile devices have shifted the interest of service engineering towards frameworks that are able to deliver applications rapidly and efficiently. The development of services that can be fully functional in mobile environments and operable on a variety of devices is an important and complex task...

The COIN service platform allows exposure, combination and integration of interoperability and collaborative services for their application to specific business domains. As part of the COIN sub-project 7, the objective is to exploit the COIN service platform in order to apply COIN services to the Cyprus marine shipping sector; together with our ind...

Programming languages have evolved through the course of research from machine dependent to high-level "platform-independent" languages. This shift towards abstraction aims to reduce the effort and time required by developers to create software services. It is also a strong indicator of reduced development costs and a direct measure of a positive i...

Pervasive services are highly customizable and personalized services that must have the capability to run anytime, anywhere, and on any device with minimal user attention. The creation of these dynamic services using application level approaches becomes a daunting task for the software engineering community. This necessitates changes to the way ser...

The constant advent of powerful mobile devices has raised the potential of building novel context-aware applications. These applications let the users enjoy a better experience by sensing their context and automating tasks that would otherwise require significant user attention. This paper presents two context-aware applications, built on top of th...

Pervasive service creation entails a complex process that involves a diversity of development aspects. Context-awareness is an important facet of pervasive service creation, which deals with the acquisition, rendering, representation and utilisation of context information. In this paper we tackle context-awareness at the application level dealing w...

In any form of communication it is vital that both parties can understand the same language, if they cannot a translator is required. Currently mobile users engage the service of a third party provider to translate an SMS text into a different language. The existing services have a number of drawbacks e.g. high cost to the user, not user friendly,...

The creation of services is a complex activity that involves several tasks. Furthermore this complexity is augmented by the fact that supporting service creation environments are technology-specific. Consequently a technology-independent approach and framework are required to generate service creation environments and drive service creation. In thi...

— Currently mobile users engage the services of a third party provider to translate an SMS text into a different language. The existing services have a number of drawbacks e.g. high cost to the user, not user friendly, they reduce the message space, and are inefficient. To communicate with a foreign person the sender must know the recipients prefer...

Service creation is a complex process that involves service analysis design, implementation and testing. Traditionally, the service is validated at the late stage of testing. This increases development costs since any necessary amendments would require an iterative improving cycle on service design and implementation; until the desired result is ev...

Hybrid routing strategy is widely utilised in hierarchical routing protocols to balance the control overheads and packet delivery delay in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). In these protocols the area of the concerned MANET is usually divided into zones. As not all of the zones have the equal probability to become an active relay zone, the resources...

Telecommunications companies undergo massive transformations which reflect onto exacting requirements for controlling the costs of new Op- eration Support Systems (OSS) development and integration. This calls for the adoption of new approaches, which improve agility and reusability. Model Drive Development (MDD), as specified by OMG, can drasticall...