Professor Soulla Louca

Soulla Louca has received her PhD in Computer Science in 1994 from Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Prior to that, she had received a B.A in Computer Science and Mathematics as a Fulbright scholar, and an MSc in Computer Science from Kalamazoo College and Western Michigan University respectively. She has participated and coordinated numerous projects including National Science Foundation (NSF- USA), Research Promotion Foundation (RPF-Cyprus) and European; has served as a reviewer for various international conferences/journals and has been invited several times as an evaluator for the Framework programs of the European Commission. In 2006, she was appointed by the Research Promotion Foundation-Cyprus to represent Cyprus in the Domain Committee for ICT for the European program COST (www.cost.eu) and in June 2008, she was elected the Chair of the Domain for the 36 Member States of COST. Her mandate ended successfully in September 2014. 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 labour for working towards raising the standard of living for the European citizens and beyond. 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 has designed and developed the first MSc worldwide in Digital Currency, the technology for publishing academic certificates on the blockchain (https://block.co/) and organized several events including Decentralized 2017 (www.decentralized.com ). She is a professor in the Management & MIS Department as well as the Director of the Blockchain Initiative at the University of Nicosia.