The Cyprus Institute is nurturing a vibrant cross-disciplinary innovation ecosystem, where a growing number of innovative ventures and commercialised services are co-designed with potential users and partners. An investment vehicle under the name CREF BV, has been created by the CREF foundation in order to hold investment positions in the spin-offs of The Cyprus Institute, while providing services to the whole ecosystem, in tight collaboration with the Innovation and Development Directorate

The Innovation and Development Directorate supports a number of actions and their level of development:

Spin-off Support

GAIA

A spin-off of, supported by RIF Pre-Seed funding.

GAIA applies advanced georeferenced big data processing and AI techniques for the management of land and infrastructure, focusing upon risk analysis for the insurance industry.

IET

A spin-off, supported by RIF Pre-Seed funding.

This new venture applies sophisticated image processing algorithms to obtain non-invasive tomographic reconstruction from infrared inspection of the human body.

NanoMicron

A spin-off, supported by RIF Pre-Seed funding.

The company employs a novel methodology for the generation of metallic nanoparticles, which gives the possibility to control their size within a wide range.

AAS

A spin off, supported by RIF Pre-Seed funding,

The company is capitalising previous industrial investments in the field of smart and adaptive facades through a novel venture, which has been established within The Cyprus Institute innovation framework.

ReCover

A spin of, supported by RIF Pre-Seed funding.

ReCover is an example of a successful collaboration between external innovators and scientists of The Cyprus Institute in the field of nanotechnologies. A new process for the fabrication of self-healing paintings is envisaged.

Establishment of Commercial Services

ARTES - Art Characterization Service

A pilot service for the commercialization of the unique CyI art characterization pipeline. The service has been granted financial support for commercial exploitation and coaching services by Cyprus Seeds.

ARTES is a highly-specialized comprehensive service framework for a science and technology-based description of works of art, artifacts and monuments, aiming to enhance their valorization and improve their management. A commercial service unit of The Cyprus Institute, it offers an integrated workflow that investigates and documents the materiality, the artistic technique and the preservation conditions of heritage assets. Building on interdisciplinary research with robust results integrating art historical and archaeological expertise with chemical/physical analyses and advanced 2D and 3D imaging, ARTES addresses major needs in the cultural heritage industry: the increased demand for accurate descriptions of heritage assets, detailed mapping and diagnostics of preservation conditions and reports addressing provenance and authentication.

Team Members

Sorin Hermon, Associate Professor, The Cyprus Institute
Nikolas Bakirtzis, Associate Professor, The Cyprus Institute
Valentina Vassallo, Research Assistant, The Cyprus Institute
Athanasios Koutoupas, Research Assistant, The Cyprus Institute

TIER - Tomographic Image Enhanced Reconstruction

A pilot service that is capitalising the developments in medical image processing through high performance computers. The service has been granted financial support for commercial exploitation and coaching services by Cyprus Seeds.

Employing the latest cyberinfrastructure and computational techniques, TIER provides tomographic medical images of unmatched quality; it thus enhances the detection and monitoring capability of malignant tumors, of cardiac and neurological diseases (e.g. Parkinson's). Leveraging know-how from nuclear physics and complex data processing, TIER enables medical centers to obtain superior quality tomographic images by postprocessing data already obtained by their scanners (e.g. PET, SPECT, MRI) and/or reduce dosage of radiopharmaceuticals in appropriately redefined canning protocols.

Team Members

Costas N. Papanicolas, Institute Professor, The Cyprus Institute
Eftathios Stiliaris, Associate Professor, Physics Dept. National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, The Cyprus Institute
Demetris Maintas, Professor Director, Institute of Isotopic Studies S.A. and Head of Dept. of Nuclear Medicine Unit of Medical Center, Athens
Loizos Koutsantonis, Postdoctoral researcher, University of Luxembourg
Konstantinos Kleovoulou, Assistant Vice President of Strategy and Development, The Cyprus Institute

Grants

Urban Food

A grant received by  EIT Food KIC  to explore new sustainable ways to produce vegetables within the built environment in order to reduce the environmental footprint of the food chain.