graduating top of the class of 2002, and receiving the Republic of Cyprus Presidential Award. He continued his education at Harvard University, where he received an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) in 2008, under the supervision of Leslie Valiant. Before joining Open University of Cyprus in 2009, he held a visiting faculty appointment at University of Cyprus. He was a keynote speaker at ISD 2017 and AmI 2018, and he has served, among others, as the PC chair of the 15th European Conference on Logics in Artificial Intelligence in 2016, and as the organizer of a workshop series on Cognitive Knowledge Acquisition since 2015. Research Areas computational cognition, knowledge representation, commonsense reasoning, reasoning about actions and change, default and non‐monotonic reasoning, formal argumentation, computational learning theory, preference elicitation, textual entailment, narrative comprehension.

Dr Vassilis Vassiliades is a Research Assistant Professor at the CYENS CoE in Cyprus where he directs the “Cognitive Artificial Intelligence and Robotics” research team. His research explores how software agents and robots efficiently learn, plan and acquire diverse skills in complex environments, often by integrating multimodal sensory data. He received an MSc in Intelligent Systems Engineering from the University of Birmingham, UK (2008), and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence (AI) from the University of Cyprus (2015). He has done post-doctoral work at Inria, France (2015-2018) working on algorithms for efficient damage recovery in robotics. Vassilis has secured more than 2M euros in funding through national, European and industrial projects, and has contributed as a reviewer and author in top-tier conferences and journals on topics related to AI, robotics, machine learning, neural networks, and evolutionary algorithms.

Chara Theocharous received a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Cyprus in 2022 and an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the same university in 2024. Her research interests center on generative AI, particularly its applications in creative fields and its role in enhancing human-AI interaction. She is currently a Research Associate in the Cognitive Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR) group at the CYENS CoE, where she works on two projects: AI Interactive Storyteller and VILMA. AI Interactive Storyteller is a user-friendly platform for creating personalized, AI-driven interactive stories, combining large language models with text-to-image and text-to-speech technologies. VILMA is developing an open-source handheld gripper to capture multimodal data from human task demonstrations, including video, instructions, and 3D trajectories. 

Constantinos Odysseos is a Cypriot engineer with a strong background in mechanical engineering, artificial intelligence, and biomedical research. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science from the Cyprus University of Technology and a Master’s in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Cyprus. He has served as CTO of EFEVRE TECH LTD, where he led the development of AI-powered biomedical platforms and autonomous lab robotics. He has also worked as a Production Manager in the medical device industry and as a Project Engineer in industrial automation. His expertise spans data science, natural language processing (NLP), computer-aided design (CAD), and regulatory compliance. He also has experience in business development within a startup environment, including strategy, investor relations, proposal writing, and fundraising. He has participated in several international conferences such as MWC, GITEX, and SLUSH.