Yiannis Laouris
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Yiannis Laouris together with George Vakanas are credited for developing the CYBER KIDS Dream. Before even launching the actual project, Maria Symeonides, at the time a software debugger working for Apple Inc at Cupertino, joined the team. The three together developed the CYBER KIDS Vision and the CYBER KIDS Philosophy]].
Yiannis was born in Pafos, Cyprus in 1958 as the son of teacher Christodoulos Laouris and house wife Artemis Laouri. He spent most of his childhood in villages following the father's appointments. He attended a year at the English School, Nicosia, three years at the Pancyprian Gymnasium and after becoming a refugee in 1974, two years at the Acropolis Gymnasium. As a kid he was always attracted in toys that allowed him to create new things. While serving in the Cypriot National Guard as the first Cypriot senior cryptographer, he managed to hack military code and improve it.
Academic History
Yiannis studied medicine at the Karl Marx University (today known as University of Leipzig (German: Universität Leipzig), in Leipzig, after having won one of three scholarships offered by the German Democratic Republic to the Cyprus Government. He, however, enjoyed the benefits of three scholarships; also one given for high grades, and a Salvador Allende Stipendium given to the best foreign student of the university. In parallel to his studies, together with Joulietta Kalli who later became his wife, he completed a PhD in Neurophysiology with Peter Schwartze as his advisor. He was awarded a summa cum laude. This achievement attracted significant press coverage [1], because they were the first foreign students who ever completed a PhD in parallel with their medical studies in the history of East Germany.
After working for almost two years as a general practician at the Limassol General Hospital in Cyprus, Yiannis continued his research in neurophysiology at the Georg-August University Göttingen with cyberneticists and systems physiologists Professors Hans Diedrich Henatsch and Uwe Windhorst. Two years later, he moved to Arizona, US, where he joined the Robotics, Prosthetics, Motor Control Group. Douglas G. Stuart. In the US, he also completed a Masters in Systems and Industrial Engineering.
Early contributions in neuroscience[edit] In the late eighties and nineties, Laouris applied Digital signal processing in time and frequency domains to single-unit recordings from experimental animals to study transmission properties and fatique of cat motor neurons, muscle afferents and Renshaw cells. He published with cyberneticians/systems physiologists Peter Schwartze, Uwe Windhorst, Roger M. Enoka and Douglas G. Stuart. Laouris has published more than 40 papers and chapters in journals such as the Experimental Brain Research, Neuroscience, Journal of Neurophysiology, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, World Futures and has presented more than 250 papers in conferences worldwide. In 1991, he founded the Cyprus Neuroscience and Technology Institute.[2]