Research: The catalyst for Cyprus’ future in the AI era

Op-eds aitechnology Research: The catalyst for Cyprus’ future in the AI era Dovrolis Face Black Background Relevant News Nepal teams seek hundreds trapped in hydropower tunnels after deadly floods 31 August 2026 Iran dismisses Trump’s post of attack on key energy hub of Kharg 31 August 2026 Research: The catalyst for Cyprus’ future in the AI era 31 August 2026 newsroom 31 August 2026 FacebookXWhatsAppEmailPrintViber By Constantine Dovrolis* For more than twenty years as a professor at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, USA, I saw the same pattern repeat itself. An undergraduate would join a research project and discover that she could create knowledge, not merely learn it. A doctoral student would develop an idea, build a prototype and, sometimes together with a professor or an experienced entrepreneur, try to turn it into a company. Most research projects do not produce startups. Most startups do not become large companies. But enough succeed to create a powerful concentration of talent, expertise, investment and employment around the Georgia Tech campus. Even projects that are not application-driven produce highly trained people who can carry their experience into industry and society. Research is the catalyst. Not because every paper becomes a product, but because sustained research keeps generating people, ideas and opportunities that would not otherwise exist. Cyprus cannot copy the American research ecosystem, nor should it try. But one lesson travels well: a country cannot become a producer of advanced technology if it does not invest seriously in the process that creates new knowledge. The Strategy connects research to national capability I am a member of the National AI Taskforce, a committee of experts chaired by Demetris Skourides, Chief Scientist for Research, Innovation and Technology. The Taskforce prepared the draft National AI Strategy, which was released for public consultation, and I write as one of its contributors. The interpretations and specific funding proposals that follow, however, are my own. The Strategy builds on a substantial base: 12 universities and more than 20 research centres, including seven Centres of Excellence. It proposes mechanisms that can connect this scientific capacity on a national scale: a National AI Research Fund, two proposed national Centres of Excellence, testbeds and data sandboxes, stronger arrangements for intellectual property and commercialisation, and access to European computing infrastructure through Pharos-CY. It also gives Cyprus focus. The six national research areas are Energy, Environment and Resource Management; Autonomous Systems; Healthcare; Security, Defence and Space; Next-Generation Wireless Telecommunications; and Foundational AI Research. These are fields in which Cyprus already has relevant expertise and institutions, significant economic interests, or important national problems to solve. The strongest results will often come from interdisciplinary teams that combine AI expertise with medicine, engineering, the natural and social sciences, or the humanities. These priorities have also been presented to the National Council for Research and Innovation. The Taskforce will work with the Deputy Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digital Policy, providing input as the Ministry prepares the updated national Research and Innovation Strategy, scheduled for public consultation later this year, so that the two strategies reinforce one another. One of the Strategy’s most consequential proposals is the National AI Research Fund. Demand is already visible. In the Research and Innovation Foundation’s 2025 Excellence Hubs call (EXCELLENCE/0925), 444 proposals competed for a total budget of €3 million, and many proposals that met the evaluation threshold remained unfunded. Cyprus has a much larger reservoir of credible research ideas than current programmes can activate. In implementing the Strategy, I would give the Fund an initial baseline of at least €5 million per year in genuinely additional, protected and multiannual funding, with scope to grow as the programme demonstrates demand and quality. Projects should be selected through rigorous, merit-based competition and international peer review where appropriate. Every qualified researcher working in Cyprus should be able to compete through an eligible host institution. The money should primarily fund researchers’ and students’ time, doctoral and postdoctoral positions, computing, data, experiments and prototypes, not additional administration and bureaucracy. That is how the Strategy can expand research itself, not simply the budget lines associated with it. The Strategy also names an AI ERC Bridge. I would develop it as a targeted programme to attract excellent AI researchers to Cyprus. An initial envelope of approximately €3 million could enable a first cohort of researchers to establish teams and ambitious research programmes here. This talent-attraction instrument would complement, rather than replace, open competition through the National AI Research Fund. Publications remain essential: they allow scientific claims to be tested and knowledge to be shared. But the national return from research cannot be measured by paper counts alone. The deeper purpose of the Strategy’s research agenda is to build three bridges: from research to education, from research to innovation, and from research to practical value in society. Let students create knowledge The first bridge is between research and education. In too many university courses, students solve problems whose answers are already known. That is useful for learning fundamentals, but insufficient in a field changing as rapidly as AI. Every AI student should confront at least one question for which the lecturer does not already know the answer. Undergraduate participation in research should become routine rather than an extracurricular privilege for a few. In suitable courses, some conventional assignments should be replaced by small, open-ended projects. Students should learn to formulate a question, study what is known, design an experiment, analyse evidence, deal with failure and present a result. This is not merely preparation for an academic career. It develops independence, judgement and disciplined problem-solving: precisely the abilities students will need in a field that will keep changing long after today’s tools become obsolete. The Strategy calls for a stronger pipeline connecting research excellence, education and employment. I would make that connection literal. Relevant grants should create meaningful roles for students, and universities should offer academic credit for supervised research. Pharos-CY, which the Strategy positions as Cyprus’s gateway to the European AI Factory and EuroHPC resources, can help teams across the country, including student teams, gain access to advanced computing resources, datasets, tools and expertise. A degree built mainly around today’s AI tools trains users of technology, and some of those tools will be outdated by graduation. Research trains people to ask tomorrow’s questions and create what comes next. Shorten the path from research to enterprise The second bridge connects research with innovation. Cyprus must build a commercialisation pathway, not merely finance isolated projects. The route from a research result to protected intellectual property, a prototype, a first customer, investment and scale should be visible, fast and repeatable. Today, each team too often has to improvise this route from scratch. A researcher with a promising result should not need to become an amateur lawyer, accountant and procurement expert before discovering whether it has commercial value. Nor does every researcher need to become an entrepreneur. The pathway should connect researchers with product builders, experienced founders, investors and industry partners who bring the complementary capabilities required to create a company. Universities have legitimate interests in intellectual property created within them. But their rules must be fast, predictable and realistic. If a spinout dies while ownership is being negotiated, everyone ends up owning a share of nothing. The Strategy addresses these obstacles through clearer rules for intellectual property, commercialisation and academic spinouts, together with national testbeds and governed data sandboxes in which technologies can be developed and validated. Crucially, it recommends a separate AI Innovation Fund. The distinction matters. In implementation, the three instruments should have distinct roles. The National AI Research Fund should support research and discovery. The AI Innovation Fund should support the engineering, validation and product development needed to turn promising ideas into usable solutions. The AI Sovereign Investment Matching Fund should bring in private capital when ventures are ready to grow. One fund cannot perform all three functions well. These mechanisms should operate as a connected pathway from a research result to a prototype, and from a prototype to a growing company, not as separate programmes with separate doors. The proposed National AI Industrial Centre of Excellence is central to that bridge. The Strategy gives it a clear national and sector-wide mission: to connect AI innovation with industrial deployment and provide engineering support, validation, regulatory guidance and access to industry for teams across Cyprus. Its success should be measured by the researchers and companies across Cyprus that it supports, and by the technologies it helps advance. In that role, it can give small teams access to capabilities they could not build efficiently on their own, and help turn experimental methods into robust, compliant and scalable systems. Move research into everyday life The third bridge is technology transfer in its broadest sense: moving knowledge from universities into existing companies, public organisations and everyday life. Not every valuable result should become a startup. It may instead improve a hospital, protect critical infrastructure, support safer shipping or make a public service work better. The appropriate route may be licensing, collaborative development, adoption by an existing company or public-sector deployment. The Strategy proposes practical mechanisms for this transfer. National testbeds and data sandboxes would support real-world validation, while government, academia and industry could co-develop solutions around important public challenges. Each pilot should begin with an operational owner, lawful access to data, an evaluation method and a credible decision path to procurement or adoption. A pilot may fail and still teach us something. A pilot that ends when its grant ends because nobody planned what would happen next is not impact. It is an exhibition. The proposed National AI Cybersecurity Centre of Excellence is especially important here. Its mission combines AI for cyber defence with the security of AI systems themselves. By bringing together academia, government and industry, it can connect frontier research with validation, standards, public-sector safeguards, critical-infrastructure protection and deployable technologies. Papers, pilots, centres and euros spent are measures of activity. The Strategy’s measurement framework asks the harder question: what economic and public value did these activities produce? Research policy should apply the same discipline to scientific value. Compete for excellence but collaborate for scale The Strategy’s research priorities require two complementary forms of funding. Investigator-led grants allow individuals and small teams to pursue original ideas. Larger national missions bring institutions together when shared data, infrastructure, complementary expertise or deployment across sectors genuinely require collaboration. This distinction matters. A consortium assembled merely to satisfy a scoring criterion is not collaboration. National missions should set goals sufficiently ambitious that no single university or research centre could achieve them alone. They should be built around genuinely shared leadership, infrastructure, data and responsibility. The inclusion of Foundational AI Research in the Strategy is therefore essential. In AI, the distance between foundational discovery and practical application can be unusually short, but it is not predictable. If every proposal must promise a startup or deployed product within three years, applicants will learn to write fictional impact statements, not better science. Cyprus needs investigator-led excellence, mission-driven programmes and researchers able to move between the two. The choice is whether we want to create The draft National AI Strategy sets out the instruments for a coherent research system: competitive funding, national focus areas, shared Centres of Excellence, access to advanced computing, routes to commercialisation, and real-world environments in which new ideas can be tested. During my years at Georgia Tech, nobody could predict which student, research result or young company would succeed. The system’s strength was that it kept creating opportunities and allowed each success to generate more talent, expertise and ambition around it. The most important result of Cyprus’s research agenda may therefore not be the algorithm described in a final report. It may be the undergraduate who discovers that she can create knowledge; the doctoral student who turns an idea into a company; the researcher whose method improves a hospital or protects a critical system; or the team from several Cypriot institutions that achieves something no single institution could have achieved alone. Cyprus cannot reproduce the scale of the United States. It can adopt the essential principle: fund excellent people and ideas, then make it easier for those ideas to cross the boundaries between education, enterprise and society. That is the research vision embedded in the National AI Strategy. It is how Cyprus can become a creator, rather than merely a consumer, of the AI technologies that will shape its future. *Constantine Dovrolis is the XM Chair in Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Cyprus and a member of the National AI Taskforce. 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