Prof. Soulla Louca

Head of the Department of Digital Innovation & Director of the Institute For the Future

University of Nicosia

Professor Soulla Louca is a professor in the newly founded Department of Digital Innovation as well as a Director at the Institute For the Future (IFF) at the University of Nicosia. She was nominated by LATTICE80 in partnership with Miss Kaya as one of the top 100 women in Fintech for 2019. With a background in Computer Science, she is one of the first academics to get involved in blockchain technologies (2014) when she assumed the responsibility of the Blockchain Initiative at the University of Nicosia. The Blockchain Initiative (renamed later to Institute For the Future) has designed and developed the first MSc worldwide in Digital Currency, the technology for publishing academic certificates on the blockchain (http://block.co/). She is leading the DLT4ALL consortium, an Erasmus+ project on designing and developing material on Decentralized Ledgers and also leads the team at IFF for the design and development of a decentralized platform for social networks for trancing fake news for the H2020 project EUNOMIA. She is active in organizing or co-organizing tech events including the Decentralized series (www.decentralized.com) as well as in research. For seven years, she headed the Domain Committee for ICT for the European program COST (www.cost.eu) for the 36 Member States of COST. Main duties were the evaluation and monitoring of the ICT Actions, which bring together more than 3000 researchers in areas like e-Society, Information Security, Networks, Nanotechnologies, etc. Furthermore, she was responsible for identifying trends, boosting pioneering research activities and help define strategies in science and technology through the organization and participation of strategic initiatives for promoting the ICT policy in Europe and beyond for the betterment and new digital experiences of European citizens. Even though her research interests for many years focused on information society (socio-economic aspects of ICT, e-learning, social integration and digital divide), due to her COST activities she had the opportunity to disperse her knowledge and work over a wide range of subjects such as personalized medicine, women in ICT, and open access. This enables her to integrate the knowledge she has gained over the years into a consistent worldview with a wider division of labor for working towards raising the standard of living for the European citizens and beyond. Her mandate ended successfully in September 2014.