The Cyprus Institute

Climate change risks, resilience strategies, conservation and preservation, society engagement and illicit trafficking are at the core of challenges Cultural Heritage is facing in Cyprus and the region.  Over the past 15 years, STARC’s Digital Cultural Heritage expertise at the Cyprus Institute, in close collaboration with the Department of Antiquities, develops tools and methods, primarily based on the merging of science and technology research driven by archaeology, art and architectural history, preservation questions, to address these challenges with a holistic, multi-disciplinary and cross-sectorial approach. Strategic investment in developing frontier research in Digital Cultural Heritage secured the further membership of the Cyprus Institute in key EU-funded initiatives aimed at developing European infrastructure (projects such as ECHOES, E-RIHS and DARIAH) and research capacity devoted to the research, conservation and preservation of Cultural Heritage, through projects such as ARCHE, HERIFORGE, ATRIUM, GRAPHIA or 3D-4CH.

 

The main goal of the proposed event, co-organised by the Cyprus Institute and the Institut Français de Chypre, under the auspices of the French Embassy in Nicosia, is to publicly present themes and recent advancements in tackling the challenges facing the broader topic of Heritage at Risk in Cyprus and discuss joint ways and strategies of moving forward. Contributions and responses related to the work of the Cyprus National Commission for UNESCO (Dr. Marina Solomidou – Ieronymidou) and the Climate Change and Cultural Heritage Task Force (Dr. Anthi Kaldeli and Prof. Nikolas Bakirtzis) will be complemented by brief overviews of STARC’s Digital Cultural Heritage activities (George Artopoulos, Sorin Hermon) pursued through the work of APAC Labs and VELab. These short presentations will be followed by specific examples of societal and digital engagements for the conservation and preservation of Cultural Heritage, through the works of the French-based NGO ACTA VISTA (Elizabeth Vénisse) and culminating with the CNRS – UMR-MAP’ contribution to the restoration of the Notre Dame de Paris cathedral (Violette Abergel and Anaïs Guillem).

Welcoming Addresses

Prof. Stavros Malas, President of the Cyprus Institute
HE Clélia Chevrier Kolačko, French Ambassador to Cyprus
Dr. George Georgiou, Director of Antiquities 

Challenges to Heritage at Risk in Cyprus

Dr. Marina Solomidou-Ieronymidou – President, UNESCO Cyprus National Committee
Dr. Anthi Kaldeli, Prof. Nikolas Bakirtzis, Department of Antiquities and STARC

Digital Cultural Heritage Research at The Cyprus Institute

Sorin Hermon, STARC
George Artopoulos, STARC

Heritage at Risk in France

Elizabeth Vénisse, ACTAVISTA
Anaïs Guillen and Violette Abergel, CRNS-MAP, Chantier Notre-Dame de Paris

Light Refreshments

 

Download the invitation (PDF)

 

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Abstracts of the French Contributions

 

Reviving Heritage, Empowering Lives: A Journey of Inclusion Through Built Heritage Restoration

Abstract

In this speech, we will explore how ACTA VISTA, an organization based in Marseille, merges heritage preservation with social inclusion. By revitalizing monumental landmarks such as the Citadel of Marseille/Fort Saint-Nicolas, the Domaine National de Chambord, and the Abbey of Saint-Sever de Rustan, ACTA VISTA creates a stepping stone for 500 men and women each year, distant from the labor market, to transition into professional life thanks to a strengthened support system. Through certified training and hands-on experience in heritage restoration, participants gain confidence, skills, and autonomy, fostering their empowerment in an ethical and inclusive framework.

This presentation will highlight how cultural heritage, education, and social inclusion can converge to generate long-lasting, meaningful societal impact.

Elizabeth Vénisse

Elizabeth Vénisse is a trilingual development and communication officer at ACTA VISTA, where she spearheads external project development, public relations, and communication initiatives. Her career spans international project management and diplomacy, with prior experience at the UN's International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in Rome and the ITER project in Cadarache, contributing to initiatives that promoted international and intercultural cooperation. Additionally, her work with several Marseille-based NGOs has strengthened her expertise in community engagement and local development. With degrees in Mediterranean and international negotiations from Sciences Po Aix and Aix-Marseille University, she is committed to using heritage restoration as a lever for social change and cultural diplomacy.

 

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Building Collective, Human, and Artificial Intelligence for Conservation and Cultural Heritage Research at the Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral

Abstract

Notre-Dame de Paris’ fire was a national catastrophe in France. Images of the fire were globally broadcasted. Emotions ran high about the destruction of this iconic historical monument. The scientific community rallied to contribute along with the restoration activities. Between 2019 and 2024, around 200 researchers participated in this collective adventure, organised into 9 thematic working groups under the auspices of the French Ministry of Culture and the CNRS: Acoustics, Wood, Heritage Emotions (Ethnography), Metal, Stone and Mortar, Decoration and Polychromy, Structure (Civil engineering), Stained Glass, and Digital Data.

This presentation will focus on the role of the Digital Data Working Group: a group of researchers committed to collecting, managing, analyzing, and visualizing data about Notre-Dame de Paris through a digital ecosystem. Beyond digital tools and environments, this work relies most of all on a close collaboration with Heritage Sciences experts : if the analytical potential of such multidisciplinary contributions seems obvious, making their digital production converge is still challenging at many levels. Developing innovative methodologies to build up a corpus of semantically rich and interconnected data, the aim is to understand how the complex characteristics of physical objects and the knowledge derived from them can interwave into a digital memory of a collective scientific adventure.

Anais Guillem

Architect, archaeologist, and finishing her PhD at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU), Anaïs Guillem currently works as research engineer at the CNRS-UPR 2002 MAP (Models and Simulations for Architecture and Heritage) for the ERC advanced grant nDame heritage project (PI: L. De Luca). Her research focuses on knowledge representation, addressing the relations between human knowledge and computational data transformations in cultural heritage and heritage sciences. What she calls digital maieutics or data therapy encompasses the practice of data integration, as well as workflows of data curation, enrichment, and analysis. Faced with the challenges raised by the multitude of viewpoints that constitutes multidimensions (nD) in datasets, she investigates the heritage objects from different perspectives to formalize the implicit human knowledge at the data level, considering spatial, temporal, knowledge domain, research protocols, data acquisition, and provenance aspects among others. She leads the thesaurus documentation and data and metadata enrichment and formalization in the Notre-Dame de Paris’ project. She is also involved in the projects E-RIHS (European Infrastructure for Heritage Science) and TEATIME, developing innovative AI methods for the versioning of multidisciplinary knowledge.

Violette Abergel

Architect and PhD in engineering sciences, Violette Abergel is a CNRS researcher at the MAP (UPR 2002 CNRS - Models and simulations for architecture and heritage) and LIRIS (UMR 5205 CNRS - Image and information systems laboratory) laboratories. Her research activities lie at the crossroads of computer science and humanities. They mainly focus on visualisation and interaction with multidimensional data, exploring the informative potential of hybridized spaces merging graph visualization and spatialized nD representations. After her PhD, which was awarded by the French Ministry of Culture, she joined the Digital Data Working Group of Notre-Dame de Paris scientific action, for which she leads the development of nd-viewer3D, an interactive 3D visualization environment for spatialized heterogeneous data. Violette Abergel is currently involved in several federative projects, including the nDame_Heritage ERC (PI: L. De Luca), and the EquipEx+ ESPADON (PI: V. Detalle), for which she co-coordinates the data task force. She currently leads the projects METAREVE (automatic metadata extraction by AI and voice recognition) and TEATIME (multidimensional, multi-temporal and multi-scale heritage data analysis).