SAVVAS CHATZICHRISTOFIS

Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Vice-Rector for Research and Innovation, Neapolis University Pafos

Savvas A. Chatzichristofis is the Vice-Rector for Research & Innovation and a Professor of AI at the Department of Computer Science of the Neapolis University Pafos (Cyprus). He also serves as director of the Intelligent Systems Laboratory.

He received his Diploma (M.Eng.) in Electrical and Computer Engineering and his Ph.D. in Computer Vision from Democritus University (Greece). After a 6-year postdoc at the Center for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH), he became a special scientist at the Cyprus University of Technology. During the same period, he also served as a visiting lecturer and researcher at the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt in Austria. In 2017, he was appointed to the rank of Associate Professor at the Neapolis University Pafos.

His research focuses on the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, and Robotics. He has been involved in numerous R&D projects funded by European or National funds. His contribution received several distinctions, grants, scholarships, and awards. Some highlights of his research career include:

• His participation in the European project sFly, which introduced a pioneered visual-SLAM-based autonomous navigation mechanism for UAVs in GPS-denied environments,
• His participation in the European project NOPTILUS as Technical Scientific Manager. This project proposed a novel methodology that allows the cooperative, fully-autonomous navigation of teams of AUVs,
• His contribution to the field of image retrieval through the development of Compact Composite Descriptors (CCDs), a set of low-level features that can be used to accurately describe and retrieve visual multimedia content.

It is worth noting that his research on educational robotics has been awarded the Cyprus Education Leaders Awards in 2020 and 2021. In addition, his research lab has participated in numerous international educational robotics competitions, winning multiple awards and distinctions.

He has been a reviewer for leading scientific journals in artificial intelligence, image processing, and multimedia (e.g., IEEE PAMI, IEEE TMM, IEEE TRO, etc.). He is also an editorial board member in several international academic journals. Moreover, he has served as a reviewer and member of the program committees of several international conferences/workshops (e.g., IEEE IROS, IEEE ICRA, etc.). He is also a Senior member of the IEEE and a proud Sigma Xi member.

As a software developer, he has worked on several popular, open-source, and commercial software tools for different fields, including multimedia, information retrieval, information management, and gaming. He is one of the contributors to the LIRe library, the img(Rummager) platform, and the core developer of the Houdini MC project.

In his free time, he writes children’s stories.