Team

The proposed project brings together four internationally recognized PIs and their teams to address important fundamental issues in the development of intelligent and sustainable urban water systems

Principal Investigators

Prof. Marios Polycarpou

University of Cyprus and KIOS Research and Innovation Centre of Excellence

Dragan Savić

KWR Water Research Institute and University of Exeter

Photo: S. Jonek / Bielefeld University

Barbara Hammer

Bielefeld University

Phoebe Koundouri

Athens University of Economics and Business, ReSEES Laboratory on Socio-Economic and Environmental Sustainability

Prof. Marios Polycarpou

University of Cyprus and KIOS Research and Innovation Centre of Excellence

Marios Polycarpou is 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.
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Dragan Savić

KWR Water Research Institute and University of Exeter

Dragan Savić is Chief Executive Officer at KWR Water Research Institute based in the Netherlands and Professor of Hydroinformatics at the University of Exeter in the UK. He obtained his PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Manitoba, Canada, in 1990, and then held a number of academic, consultancy and project management positions in Canada and his native Serbia, before relocating to the United Kingdom, where he co-founded the University of Exeter Centre for Water Systems in 1998.

  • In 2001 he became the UK’s first Professor of Hydroinformatics, holding this post until 2018 at the University of Exeter, where he was also the head of the Engineering faculty between 2010 and 2014.
  • In 2013 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng), the highest honour for a UK engineer.
  • He is also a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers (UK), a Fellow of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (UK), and a Fellow of the International Water Association (IWA).

His research interests cover the interdisciplinary field of Hydroinformatics, which transcends traditional boundaries of water/environmental science and engineering, informatics/computer science (including Artificial Intelligence, data mining and optimisation techniques) and environmental engineering.

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Barbara Hammer

Bielefeld University

Barbara Hammer is a full Professor for Machine Learning at the CITEC Cluster at Bielefeld University, Germany. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1999 and her venia legendi (permission to teach) in 2003, both from the University of Osnabrueck, Germany, where she chaired a junior research group on 'Learning with Neural Methods on Structured Data'.

In 2004, she became Professor for Theoretical Computer Science at Clausthal University of Technology, Germany, before moving to Bielefeld as chair of the Machine Learning group in 2010. Several research stays took her to University Paris I, University of Padova, Birmingham University, and CAIR Bangalore.

Barbara's research interests cover theory and algorithms in machine learning and neural networks and their application for technical systems and the life sciences, including explainability, learning with drift, nonlinear dimensionality reduction, recursive models, and learning with non-standard data.

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Phoebe Koundouri

Athens University of Economics and Business, ReSEES Laboratory on Socio-Economic and Environmental Sustainability

Phoebe Koundouri, is a world-renowned environmental economics professor and global leader in sustainable development. She is widely recognized as a pioneer in innovative, human-centric, interdisciplinary systems for the sustainable interaction between nature, society, and the economy.

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Research Team

All UCY KWR UOE Bielefeld AUEB

Demetrios G. Eliades

University of Cyprus

Demetrios G. Eliades

University of Cyprus

Demetris Eliades holds a BSc/MSc (2004) in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, an MSc (2005) in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and a PhD (2011) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cyprus. Since 2019, he is a Research Assistant Professor at the KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence, of the University of Cyprus. His research is focused on monitoring, control and security of smart water networks. He has authored and co-authored articles published in journals and conferences proceedings, in the areas of water systems, building systems, power systems, control and robotics. He is the Technical Coordinator of the H2020 PathoCERT project.

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Stelios Vrachimis

University of Cyprus

Stelios Vrachimis

University of Cyprus

Stelios G. Vrachimis received the Ph.D. and B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus, in 2020 and 2011 respectively, and a M.Sc. in Control Systems from Imperial College London, in 2012. From 2012 to 2020, he was a graduate-level Researcher at the KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence, at the University of Cyprus, where he is currently a Post-Doctoral Research Associate. His research interests include the optimization, real-time state estimation, fault-diagnosis and fault-adaptive control of critical infrastructure systems, with applications focused on water distribution systems. He has volunteered as a reviewer to IEEE transactions and conferences, and has served as an associate editor to the ASCE Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management. He is a member of IEEE, the Cyprus Technical Chamber, and Cyprus Young Water Professionals.

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KWR Water Research Institute

Lydia Vamvakeridou-Lyroudia

KWR Water Research Institute

Lydia Vamvakeridou-Lyroudia

KWR Water Research Institute

Lydia S. Vamvakeridou-Lyroudia has an engineering background, with expertise and research interests focused mainly on computational modelling and hydroinformatics across a wide range of subjects: Water Supply and Distribution Systems, Smart Meters, System Dynamics Modelling, the Water-Energy-Food Nexus, Serious Gaming, the Circular Economy and Artificial Intelligence techniques for Water Systems.

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KWR Water Research Institute

Lydia Tsiami

KWR Water Research Institute

Lydia Tsiami

KWR Water Research Institute

Lydia Tsiami is a civil engineer specializing in hydraulic engineering and water management (MEng, NTUA). During her thesis, she developed a deep learning model to detect cyber-physical attacks in water distribution networks. Her passion lies in finding new ways to use artificial intelligence to solve water management problems.

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Researcher

University of Exeter

Researcher

University of Exeter

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André Artelt

Bielefeld University

André Artelt

Bielefeld University

André Artelt studied B.Sc. Congnitive Informatics (2017) and M.Sc. Intelligent Systems (2019) at Bielefeld University.

Since 2019 he is a researcher in the Machine Learning group at Bielefeld University. Prior to that he spent some time in industry working in the software development department at Schüco International KG (2013-2019).

His research focuses on eXplainable AI.

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Inaam Ashraf

Bielefeld University

Inaam Ashraf

Bielefeld University

Inaam Ashraf completed MSc Data Analytics from University of Hildesheim in April 2022. He has worked with SAP Security Research for over an year where he also completed his Master Thesis in the area of  Anomaly Detection using Deep Learning.

He also holds a BSc in Electrical Engineering (2005) and a Master in Business Administration (2009) and has worked as a Financial Analyst at the State Bank of Pakistan for a number of years.

He began his Doctoral Studies at the Bielefeld University in May 2022 focusing on Deep Learning for Water Distribution Networks.

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Ulrike Kuhl

Bielefeld University

Ulrike Kuhl

Bielefeld University

Ulrike Kuhl holds a BSc (2012) and MSc (2014) in Cognitive Science from University Osnabrück. Studying developmental neural correlates of literacy and numeracy at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, she was awarded a PhD in Psychology from Leipzig University in 2019. Afterwards, she joined the machine learning group at University Bielefeld as a Postdoctoral researcher. Her current academic interests lie in the field of eXplainable AI, focusing on the development of usable explanations for automated decision making and machine learning models that meet the cognitive requirements of end users.

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Alexander Schulz

Bielefeld University

Alexander Schulz

Bielefeld University

Alexander Schulz defended his Ph.D. thesis with the title 'Discriminative Dimensionality Reduction: Variations, Applications, Interpretations' at CITEC, Bielefeld University in early 2017. Currently, he is working as a post doc in the Machine Learning group at Bielefeld University. He has collaborated with groups from the Aalto University in Finland, the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, the University of Namur in Belgium and the Medical University of Vienna in Austria. His scientific contributions are in the areas of dimensionality reduction for data visualization, model interpretability, transfer learning and myoelectric control.

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Janine Strotherm

Bielefeld University

Janine Strotherm

Bielefeld University

Janine is holding a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Physics (and a Bachelor for teaching in the same subjects) (April 2020),  and a M.Sc. in Mathematics (May 2022) from Bielefeld University. In her master thesis she worked on theoretical and practical investigation of training overparameterized neural networks using natural gradient descent.
She also has some work experience as a Data Scientist in a local start up and as a teacher.

Since June 2022 she is a doctoral student in the Machine Learning group at Bielefeld University. Her research is centered around fairness enhancing machine learning algorithms in the field of water distribution networks.

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Valerie Vaquet

Bielefeld University

Valerie Vaquet

Bielefeld University

Valerie holds a B.Sc. in Cognitive Informatics (2017) and a M.Sc. in Intelligent Systems (2020) from Bielefeld University. Currently she works in the Machine Learning group at Bielefeld University as a researcher and doctoral student. Her research focuses on sensor drift adaptation and learning from non-stationary data streams.

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Researcher

Athens University of Economics and Business

Researcher

Athens University of Economics and Business

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