EDBT 2025 Summer School

About Cyprus

Geography

Cyprus is the third largest island in the Mediterranean, after Sicily and Sardinia, with an area of 9.251 sq. kms (3.572 sq. miles). It is situated at the north-eastern corner of the Mediterranean, 300 km north of Egypt. The Greek Island of Rhodes lies 360 km to the north-west.

Cyprus’ coastal line is indented and rocky in the north with long sandy beaches in the south. The north coastal plain, covered with olive and carob trees, is backed by the steep and narrow Pentadaktylos mountain range of limestone, rising to a height of 1.042 m. In the south, the extensive mountain massif of Troodos, covered with pine, dwarf oak, cypress and cedar, culminates in the peak of Mount Olympus, 1.953 m. above sea level. Between the Troodos range and the Pentadaktylos mountain range lies the fertile plain of Messaoria. Arable land constitutes 46.8 per cent of the total area of the island. There are no rivers, only torrents which flow after heavy rain.

Demography

The population of the Republic of Cyprus is 952.100 (2012) of whom 681.000 belong to the Greek Cypriot community, (71,5%), 90.100 (9,5%) to the Turkish Cypriot community (estimate) and 181.000 (19,0%) are foreign citizens residing in Cyprus. The language of the Greek Cypriot community is Greek, and the community adheres predominantly to the Autocephalous Greek Orthodox Church of Cyprus. The language of the Turkish Cypriot community is Turkish, and the members of the community are Sunni Muslims.

History

The earliest presence of human beings in Cyprus dates back 10,500 years. Noteworthy from the prehistoric period are a burial dating back to 7,500 BC, which contained the remains of a cat, making it the earliest evidence of feline domestication in the world and the Neolithic settlement for Choirokoitia, which dates to 6,800 BC and is a UNESCO World Heritage site.

The introduction of copper made Cyprus one of the most important exporters of the metal in the Middle East and beyond and during this time we find Cyprus being mentioned in letters between its kings and the kings of Egypt, the Hittite kingdom and the kingdoms of the Levant. It is during the second millennium BC that contact with the Minoan civilization and then the Mycenaeans from Greece brought the first waves of Greek colonization to the island. By the end of the second millennium BC the Greek identity was firmly established on the island. This is also the time that the modern name, Cyprus (Κύπρος in Greek), appeared for the first time.

Other peoples from the Levant, like the Phoenicians, Assyrians, Egyptians, and Persians interacted with Cyprus, either by setting up trading posts or by bringing Cyprus under their direct or indirect control. Alexander the Great seized the island in 333 BC and subsequently it was passed on to Ptolemaic Egypt and then Rome. Christianity was preached in Cyprus by Apostle Paul in the first half of the first century AD and it is said that the Roman proconsul of Cyprus, Sergius Paulus, converted to Christianity, becoming the first Christian ruler. Christianity remains the predominant religion on the island.

The island then passed to the Eastern Roman Empire in 330 AD. The island was invaded by the Arabs in 649 AD and from 688 AD it was considered a condominium between the Byzantines and the Arabs. This lasted until 965 AD when the Arabs were defeated by the Byzantine Emperor Nicephorus II Fokas. In 1191 AD King Richard the Lionheart conquered Cyprus and sold it to the Knights Templars who, in turn, sold it to Guy de Lusignan, the former King of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. He was the first King of the Frankish dynasty which ruled Cyprus until 1489 when the widow of the last king, Catherine Cornaro, abdicated her throne in favour of the Republic of Venice. In 1570 the Ottoman Turks invaded Cyprus which fell after a year of fighting. The Ottoman occupation lasted until 1878 when Cyprus became a British Protectorate and, from 1925, a Crown Colony.

After an armed struggle by the Greek Cypriots in 1955-59, the island was granted independence in 1960. In 1974 Turkey invaded the north of the island in response to a coup which overthrew the elected president of the Republic of Cyprus and has been occupying 37% of the island since. This resulted in the mass displacement of 160,000 Greek Cypriots to the south and 40,000 Turkish Cypriots to the north. Today the island is a European Union Member State, but the northern part is not controlled by the internationally recognized government of the Republic of Cyprus.

Cypriot Flag

The flag of the Republic of Cyprus was defined in 1960 when Cyprus became an independent sovereign state.

The background is white with a copper-coloured (pantone 1385 C) silhouette of the map of Cyprus in the centre of the flag, above two crossed olive-green-coloured (pantone 574 C) olive branches. The copper colour has a dual symbolism. First the name “Copper” derives from the Latin “Cuprum” for Cyprus, since the Romans associated the metal with the island, and second the colour is not associated with either the Greek or the Turkish flags.  The olive branches are symbols of peace.

Climate

Cyprus has a Mediterranean climate: hot, dry summers from June to September and mild, wet winters from November to March, which are separated by short Autumn and Spring seasons. Sunshine is abundant during the whole year, particularly from April to September when the daily average exceeds eleven hours. Winds are on the whole light to moderate. Gales are very infrequent and heavy storms rare.

Snow hardly falls in the lowlands and on the northern range, but is a frequent feature, every winter on ground above 1.000 metres in the Troodos range. During the coldest months it lies in considerable depth for several weeks, attracting skiers.

Food and Drink

The food of Cyprus reflects the rich and turbulent history of the island and its indelible Greek culture. You will find tastes influenced by the Middle East, Asia Minor and the Venetians, all using fresh local ingredients, herbs and spices and olive oil. The Mediterranean diet, with its grains and pulses, sun-ripened fresh fruit and vegetables, high-protein fish, lean meat and poultry and wine, is a healthy option.

Cyprus is known for its Hallumi chese which is made from goat milk and unlike other cheeses it can be cooked in a variety of ways without melting.

Cyprus has a long tradition in winemaking that goes back over 4,000 years. In ancient times wine was a major source of wealth for the island. The island supplied the Pharaohs of Egypt and Cyprus wines were in great demand amongst the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Commandaria is acknowledged to be the oldest wine in the world and was probably the first to be given an ‘Appellation d’Origin’(label of geographical origin). Legend says that Commandaria was originally made for Richard the Lionheart and the Crusaders. The dessert wine, which has a taste like sweet sherry, has been made using the same method for hundreds of years. The grapes are picked late, dried in the sun to enhance their sugar content and then pressed. The run-off is collected and fermented in tanks or in huge earthen ware jars. The sweet wine of Cyprus became known throughout Europe under the name Commandaria depicting its geographical origin “Commandarie” which was the name given to the land owned by the Knights Templar and later the Knights of St. John.

About Nicosia

General

Nicosia is a sophisticated and cosmopolitan city, rich in history and culture that combines its historic past with the amenities of a modern city. Nicosia has established itself as the island’s financial capital and its main international business centre. The ‘new’ Nicosia developed outside the walls became a contemporary, business and cultural centre. Just a few miles away are enchanting places of interest such as Byzantine churches and monasteries, archaeological sites and charming villages. The uniqueness of such a combination makes the capital of Cyprus a place worth knowing and certainly a place worth visiting!

History

Nicosia is the capital of Cyprus; a status it has enjoyed for 1000 years since the 10th century, though its beginnings date back 5000 years to the Bronze Age. It lies roughly in the centre of the island in the Mesaoria Plain, flanked by the beautiful northern range of Kyrenia Mountains with its distinctive ‘Pentadaktylos’ – the five finger mountain. There are various suggestions as to the origin of the name Nicosia – or ‘Lefkosia’ In Greek – but the most likely one is linked to the popular tree, the tall ‘Lefki‘ which once adorned the city.

Based in Nicosia are the Government head offices, Diplomatic headquarters and the cultural centre of Cyprus. The capital presents two distinct faces: the old, original part of the city, surrounded by sturdy Venetian walls built in 1570, and a busy modern metropolis which has a population of nearly 300,000, together with the suburbs.

Within the large area, encircled by the strong bastion walls that served to protect the town for centuries, are many places of great historic interest.

The central Eleftheria Square links old Nicosia with the elegant modern city that has flourished outside the walls, where hotels, offices restaurants and gardens blend happily with the fine old houses and colonial buildings of this cosmopolitan city.

Ioana Manolescu is a senior researcher at Inria Saclay and a part-time professor at Ecole Polytechnique, France. She is the lead of the CEDAR INRIA team focusing on rich data analytics at cloud scale. She is also the president of BDA, the French national scientific association focused on data management. She has been the PVLDB Endowment Board of Trustees, and has been Associate Editor for PVLDB, president of the ACM SIGMOD PhD Award Committee, chair of the IEEE ICDE conference, and a program chair of EDBT, SSDBM, ICWE among others. A Senior ACM member since 2021, she is a recipient of the ACM SIGMOD 2020 Contribution Award.

Ioana has co-authored more than 150 articles in international journals and conferences and co-authored books on “Web Data Management” and on “Cloud-based RDF Data Management”. Her main research interests algebraic and storage optimizations for semistructured data, in particular Semantic Web graphs, novel data models and languages for complex data management, data models and algorithms for fact-checking and data journalism, a topic where she is collaborating with journalists from Le Monde. She is also a recipient of the ANR AI Chair titled “SourcesSay: Intelligent Analysis and Interconnexion of
Heterogeneous Data in Digital Arenas” (2020-2024).

Interconnection of Heterogeneous Data using AI

TBD

Flora Salim is a Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE),  the inaugural Cisco Chair of Digital Transport & AI, University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, and the Deputy Director (Engagement) of UNSW AI Institute. Her research is on machine learning for time-series and multimodal sensor data and on trustworthy AI. She has received several prestigious fellowships  including Humboldt-Bayer Fellowship, Humboldt Fellowship, Victoria Fellowship, and ARC Australian Postdoctoral (Industry) Fellowship.

She has attracted more than $20m in research and industry funding in the last 10 years, as lead or sole CI for more than half of these grants, including research funded by ARC, Microsoft Research US, Northrop Grumman Corporation US, Qatar National Priorities Research Program, Cisco, IBM Research, several city councils and many other industry and government partners/funders. She is a Chief Investigator on the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making and Society (ADM+S), co-leading the Machines Program and the Mobilities Focus Area. She was the recipient of the Women in AI Awards 2022 Australia and New Zealand in the Defence and Intelligence Category.

She is a member of the Australian Research Council (ARC) College of Experts. She serves as an Editor of IMWUT, Associate-Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Pervasive Computing, Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems, a Steering Committee member of ACM UbiComp. She has served as a Senior Area Chair / Area Chair of AAAI, WWW, NeurIPS, and many other top-tier conferences in AI and ubiquitous computing.

She is an Associate of ELLIS Alicante and holds an Honorary Professor appointment at RMIT University. She was a Visiting Professor at University of Kassel, Germany, and University of Cambridge, England, in 2019.
Group website: https://cruiseresearchgroup.github.io; Personal website: florasalim.com 

Foundational AI for Time Series and Multimodal Sensors

TBD

Sihem Amer-Yahia is a Silver Medal CNRS Research Director and Deputy Director of the Lab of Informatics of Grenoble. She works on exploratory data analysis and fairness in job marketplaces. Before joining CNRS, she was Principal Scientist at QCRI, Senior Scientist at Yahoo! Research and Member of Technical Staff at at&t Labs. Sihem is PC chair for SIGMOD 2023 and vice president of the VLDB Endowment. She currently leads the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiative for the database community.

AI Planning for Date Exploration

TBD

Dr. Charalampos Tsourakakis received his Ph.D. from the Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization (ACO) program at Carnegie Mellon University, and served as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Harvard University. He holds a Diploma in Electrical and Diploma Engineering from the National  Technical University of Athens and a Master of Science from the Machine  Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. Before joining Boston University, he worked as a researcher in the Google Brain team.
He won a best paper award in IEEE Data Mining, has delivered three tutorials in  the ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, and has designed two graph mining libraries for large-scale graph mining, one of which has been officially included in Windows Azure. His research focuses on large-scale graph mining, and machine learning.

Algorithmic Techniques in Graph Analytics

TBD

Machine Learning in Graph Analytics

TBD

Volker Markl is a German Professor of Computer Science. He leads the Chair of Database Systems and Information Management at TU Berlin and the Intelligent Analytics for Massive Data Research Department at DFKI. In addition, he is Director of the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD). He is a database systems researcher, conducting research at the intersection of distributed systems, scalable data processing, and machine learning. Volker led the Stratosphere project, which resulted in the creation of Apache Flink. Volker has received numerous honors and prestigious awards, including best paper awards at ACM SIGMOD, VLDB, and ICDE. In 2014, he was elected one of Germany‘s leading “Digital Minds“ (Digitale Köpfe) by the German Informatics Society. He was elected an ACM Fellow for his contributions to query optimization, scalable data processing, and data programmability. He is currently President of the VLDB Endowment, and serves as advisor to academic institutions, governmental organizations, and technology companies. Volker holds eighteen patents and has been co-founder and mentor to several startups.

Large-scale Data Management in Flink

TBD

Edge Data Management in NebulaStream

TBD

Network Theory/Data Mining/Machine Learning

TBD

Network Theory/Data Mining/Machine Learning

TBD

Mohamed F. Mokbel received BSc and MSc degrees in Computer Science from Alexandria University, Egypt, in 1996 and 1999, respectively, and PhD degree in Computer Science from Purdue University in 2005. He is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota. His research interests include database systems, spatial data, and GIS. His research work has been recognized by the ACM SIGSPATIAL 10-Year Impact Award and VLDB 10-years Best Paper Award. He is the Editor-in-Chief for ACM Transactions on Spatial algorithms and Systems (ACM TSAS). Mohamed is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and IEEE Fellow.

Prof. Constantine Dovrolis is the Director of the center for Computational Science and Technology (CaSToRC) at The Cyprus Institute (CyI) as of 1/1/2023. He is also a Professor at the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). He is a graduate of the Technical University of Crete (Engr.Dipl. 1995), University of Rochester (M.S. 1996), and University of Wisconsin-Madison (Ph.D. 2000).

His research is highly inter-disciplinary, combining Network Theory, Data Mining and Machine Learning. Together with his collaborators and students, they have published in a wide range of scientific disciplines, including climate science, biology, and neuroscience. More recently, his group has been focusing on neuro-inspired architectures for machine learning based on what is currently known about the structure and function of brain networks.

According to Google Scholar, his publications have received more than 15,000 citations with an h-index of 56. His research has been sponsored by US agencies such as NSF, NIH, DOE, DARPA, and by companies such as Google, Microsoft and Cisco. He has published at diverse peer-reviewed conference and journals such as the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), the ACM SIGKDD conference, PLOS Computational Biology, Network Neuroscience, Climate Dynamics, the Journal of Computational Social Networks, and others.

Machine Learning for Big Spatial Data and Applications

TBD

Large Language Models and for Spatio-temporal Queries

TBD

Large Language Models and Privacy

 TBD

Li Xiong is a Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Emory University. She held a Winship Distinguished Research Professorship from 2015-2018. She has a Ph.D. from Georgia Institute of Technology, an MS from Johns Hopkins University, and a BS from the University of Science and Technology of China. Her research lab, Assured Information Management and Sharing (AIMS), conducts research in the intersection of data management, machine learning, and data privacy and security, with a recent focus on privacy-enhancing and trustworthy machine learning and data sharing algorithms to advance data driven-AI systems for healthcare, public health, and spatial intelligence. She has published over 180 papers and received six best paper or runner up awards. She has served and serves as associate editor for IEEE TKDE, IEEE TDSC, and VLDBJ, general chair for ACM SIGSPATIAL 2024, CIKM 2022, program chair for IEEE BigData 2020 and ACM SIGSPATIAL 2020, 2018, tutorial chair for VLDB 2024, program vice-chair for VLDB 2024, ACM SIGMOD 2024, 2022, and IEEE ICDE 2023, 2020. Her research is supported by federal agencies including NSF, NIH, IARPA, AFOSR, PCORI, and industry awards including Google, IBM, Mitsubishi, Cisco, AT&T, and Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She is an IEEE fellow.

Cyrus Shahabi is a Professor of Computer Science, Electrical & Computer Engineering and Spatial Sciences; Helen N. and Emmett H. Jones Professor of Engineering; and the director of the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering. He also served as the Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science at USC from 2017 to 2022. He was co-founder of two startups, Geosemble Technologies and Tallygo, which both were acquired in July 2012 and March 2019, respectively. He received his BS in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 1989 and then his MS and Ph.D. Degrees in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in May 1993 and August 1996, respectively. He authored two books and more than three hundred research papers in databases, GIS and multimedia with over 14 US Patents.

Dr. Shahabi has received funding from several agencies such as NSF, NIJ, NASA, NIH, DARPA, AFRL, IARPA, NGA, and DHS, as well as several industries such as Chevron, Cisco, Google, HP, Intel, Microsoft, NCR, NGC, and Oracle. He chaired the founding nomination committee of ACM SIGSPATIAL for its first term (2008-2011 term) and served as the chair of ACM SIGSPATIAL for the 2017-2020 term. He was an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS) from 2004 to 2009, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) from 2010 to 2013, VLDB Journal from 2009 to 2015 and PVLDB (Vol. 16) in 2023. He is on the ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems (TSAS) editorial board and ACM Computers in Entertainment. He was the founding chair of the IEEE NetDB workshop and the general co-chair of SSTD’15, ACM GIS 2007, 2008, and 2009. He has been PC co-chair of several conferences, such as APWeb+WAIM’2017, BigComp’2016, MDM’2016, DASFAA 2015, IEEE MDM 2013, IEEE BigData 2013 and VLDB 2024. He regularly serves on the program committee of major conferences such as VLDB, SIGMOD, IEEE ICDE, ACM SIGKDD, IEEE ICDM, and ACM Multimedia.

Dr. Shahabi is a fellow of IEEE and NAI (National Academy of Inventors). He received the ACM Distinguished Scientist Award 2009, the 2003 US Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the NSF CAREER award in 2002, and the 2001 Okawa Foundation Research Award. He was also a recipient of the US Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF) faculty fellowship award in 2011 and 2012, an organizer of the 2011 National Academy of Engineering “Japan-America Frontiers of Engineering” program, an invited speaker in the 2010 National Research Council (of the National Academies) Committee on New Research Directions for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and a participant in the 2005 National Academy of Engineering “Frontiers of Engineering” program.

Preserving Privacy in Location Data for Urban Mobility Research

 
In this presentation, I will delve into the pivotal role of location data and its analysis in fueling a wide array of applications spanning urban planning, transportation, public health, and security. Concurrently, I will underscore the sensitivity of this data, compounded by growing privacy concerns, potentially hindering its accessibility. Therefore, I will survey various strategies aimed at safeguarding location privacy, all the while preserving the invaluable utility of these applications.

Of particular focus will be our exploration of deep neural network methodologies tailored for the release of both aggregated location data and the generation of synthetic location visit sequences. I will conclude by unveiling emerging applications on the horizon, accompanied by the associated challenges and open questions awaiting resolution.