(Some) Research Activities at the Department of Computer Science 
of the University of Cyprus

A.C. Kakas, G. Papadopoulos and C. Schizas 

Introduction:
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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
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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
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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
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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).