(Some) Research Activities at the Department of Computer Science
of the University of Cyprus
A.C. Kakas, G. Papadopoulos and C. Schizas
Introduction:
In this talk we outline some of the research activities at the department
of Computer Science of the newly established University of Cyprus. These
activities include multimedia design and databases (and networks), multimedia
databases and telematics in medicine and the development of flexible intelligent
scheduling systems. All these activities have strong links with other institutions
form Europe and Mediterranean region.
A complete account of the departments research activities can be found in
its second research report to be published in May 1996. This report will
also be available from the departments WWW home page.
Multimedia Design and Databases
MULTIMEDIA DATABASES
This work is driven by the application of multimedia technology to appropriate
databases that would capture the arts and culture heritage of Cyprus.
The various items that compose the arts and culture heritage can be cataloged
and analyzed by experts, stored in multimedia databases and presented by
multimedia presentation tools.
Our first attempt in this direction is to create a presentation for one
of the major monasteries in Cyprus. Our long term aim is to develop similar
systems for other cultural sides and link these together thus providing
a medium appropriate for tourism, and other activities such as research
in the culture and history of the island.
This monastery has an important treasures collection. The goals of the particular
project are:
- To present the different activities of the monastery.
- To present the treasures of the monastery and all the information
that the researchers working for the monastery have created.
- To create an adaptive presentation application that will support different
users.
The adaptation of the system is necessary since the monastery is a big organization
that supports different activities from culture research to treasure preservation
and is expected to be used by avariety of users not necessarily related
directly to monastery life. A main research problem is to provide the user
appropriate tools to find the information that she is most interested without
having to search through all the information database.
MULTIMEDIA DESIGN PATTERNS
It is generally accepted that expert designers typically do not solve every
problem from scratch, but reuse solutions that they have developed in the
past. Such reuse of design experience is more important than reuse of code,
enjoying many advantages such as portability, application and system independence.
Recently, Design Patterns that express and record general solutions for
recurrent problems that arise in different situations, have been developed
and applied to several object- oriented systems. Very little work has been
done in applying this approach to multimedia systems.
Our work focuses on extending the design patterns in order to develop multimedia
design patterns that will address specific problems in multimedia systems
design and will act as general solutions for building multimedia systems.
At this stage the work is concerned with basic research problems, the intention
being to develop a general purpose object-oriented multimedia development
framework and apply this to the case of a multimedia virtual museum.
Multimedia Databases and Telematics
It has been proposed that the provision of emergency care in non-hospital
locations, as is the case of ambulance vehicles manned by paramedics can
be enhanced significantly with the adoption of new technologies such as
teleconsulting and teleconferencing. Such possibilities exist today because
of rapid advances in communicationstechnology that enable the transmission
of a variety of signals in digital format, by fixed lines or wireless methods.
The main objective of this project is to develop a portable medical device
hich can be used by mobile health care providers (ambulances,etc.) and allow
remote monitoring, teleconferencing and telconsulting between the mobile
unit and specialist physicians in a hospital site. Additionally, the system
can be used by elderly or handicapped persons to monitor their health condition
and to obtain medical instructions.
Flexible Intelligent Scheduling Systems
This work aims to develop a general methodology for building intelligent
scheduling systems based on a framework that integrates abductive and constraint
logic programming. The main features of this approach is that it allows
simpler representation of problems, closed to their natural specification,
combined with the efficiency of specialized constraint solving in constraint
logic programming. The expressiveness offered by this approach allows more
direct and faithful modeling of problems that can be easily customized to
the specific application at hand. This then enables the rapid development
of systems which are modular and flexible in the sense that they can be
easily modified to accommodate changes in the application problem. We are
currently developing several applications that include timetabling for our
university, timetabling of high school programs (for the ministry of education),
crew scheduling (for Cyprus Airways) and personnel rostering (for Hospital
and Prisson Staff).
This paper is also available in rtf format