Pavlos Nicolaou
Research Associate, KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence, University of Cyprus.
I work on ubiquitous computing, with the focus on finding solution with the use of Machine Learning and smart devices to help daily living. My research explores how smart devices, like smartphones, wearables and ambient sensors can passively monitor health and daily activities while respecting privacy.
I completed my PhD at the University of Kent in 2024, supervised by Christos Efstratiou, on acoustic sensing models for elderly care in single-occupancy homes. Before that I worked on AR/VR systems for pedestrian navigation and serious games for stroke rehabilitation.
email· scholar· github· linkedin· twitter· researchgate
Research interests
- Ubiquitous and mobile sensing
- Acoustic machine learning for health
- Privacy-preserving, on-device ML
- Wearables and physiological signals
- LLM tooling and retrieval-augmented systems
Publications
- Lakehal A., Nicolaou P., Lepreux S., Efstratiou C., Kolski C. Spatial knowledge acquisition for pedestrian navigation: a comparative study between smartphones and AR glasses. Information, 2023. [paper]
- Nicolaou P., Efstratiou C. Tracking daily routines of elderly users through acoustic sensing: an unsupervised learning approach. IEEE PerCom Workshops, 2022. [paper]
- Lakehal A., Nicolaou P., Lepreux S., Efstratiou C., Kolski C. Investigating smartphones and AR glasses for pedestrian navigation and their effects in spatial knowledge acquisition. MobileHCI, 2020. [paper]
- Nicolaou P., Loizou M., Loizides F. Stroke event simulator using virtual reality. VS-Games, 2016. [paper]
- Nicolaou P. Acoustic sensing for assistive living: investigating ML models to address privacy and data collection challenges. PhD thesis, University of Kent, 2024.
Selected projects
- AudioHive — iOS and Android study app that collected ambient acoustic data from 20 participants to train passive activity-recognition models. The dataset underpinned my PhD work.
- Research tooling — small open-source experiments on LLM agents for research workflows, RAG over arXiv, and wearable-data analysis (Whoop, Oura, Colmi Smart Ring).