Demokritos & QUALCO Fellowship Programme

drives AI-driven Research in FinTech

Demokritos – Qualco Fellowship programme

One of the main pillars of this programme is to support postgraduate researchers in attaining knowledge in the field of FinTech through their research in domains that Demokritos and QUALCO are active in. The programme supports an  R&D team consisting of one postdoctoral fellow and two PhD researchers to conduct their research, acquire new skills, and develop their understanding of challenges in FinTech. They are currently working on utilizing unstructured, semi-structured, and fully structured data to empower fintech analysis and advance AI-driven innovation in the FinTech sector.

Another pillar is to support Master students in putting academic knowledge into business practice. Therefore 5 students from the MSc in Data Science conducted their theses on topics that were real business challenges of QUALCO under the scientific and business supervision of both organisations.

The research directions were derived through a series of workshops conducted by QUALCO internally as well as jointly with Demokritos researchers. The outcome of the workshops was a series of business challenges which were prioritised and mapped into cutting-edge research topics.

Publications

The following publications were performed with the support of “Demokritos – Qualco Fellowship programme”:

1. Zavitsanos, E., Kelesis, D., & Paliouras, G. (2025). Calibrating TabTransformer for financial misstatement detection. Applied Intelligence, 55(1), 3.
2. Sideras, A., Bougiatiotis, K., Zavitsanos, E., Paliouras, G., & Vouros, G. (2024, November). Bankruptcy Prediction: Data Augmentation, LLMs and the Need for Auditor’s Opinion. In Proceedings of the 5th ACM International Conference on AI in Finance (pp. 453-460).
3. Zavitsanos, E., Mavroeidis, D., Spyropoulou, E., Fergadiotis, M., & Paliouras, G. (2024). Entrant: A large financial dataset for table understanding. Scientific Data, 11(1), 876.
4. Bougiatiotis, K., Sideras, A., Zavitsanos, E., & Paliouras, G. (2024, May). Dice@ ml-esg-3: Esg impact level and duration inference using llms for augmentation and contrastive learning. In Proceedings of the Joint Workshop of the 7th Financial Technology and Natural Language Processing, the 5th Knowledge Discovery from Unstructured Data in Financial Services, and the 4th Workshop on Economics and Natural Language Processing@ LREC-COLING 2024 (pp. 234-243).
5. Bougiatiotis, K., Zavitsanos, E., & Paliouras, G. (2023, December). Identifying going concern issues in auditor opinions: link to bankruptcy events. In 2023 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData) (pp. 2805-2813). IEEE.
6. Zavitsanos, E., Kosmopoulos, A., Giannakopoulos, G., Litvak, M., Carbajo-Coronado, B., Moreno-Sandoval, A., & El-Haj, M. (2023, December). The Financial Narrative Summarisation Shared Task (FNS 2023). In 2023 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData) (pp. 2890-2896). IEEE.

MSc Theses

Through this initiative, five MSc theses from the MSc in Data Science were co-supervised, each addressing advanced machine learning challenges focusing on financial data analysis.

1. Text-driven data exploration and report generation, Vitsas Alexandros-Konstantinos
2. Enhancement of text-based treatment outcome modelling in the credit sector using state-of-the-art mechanisms, Iliopoulos Ilias
3. AI driven early warnings of defaults on performing credit, Kanellopoulos Anastasios
4. AI-driven rehabilitation indicators for non-performing credit, Kinti Aikaterini
5. Text analytics approaches to multichannel information summarisation on Fintech customers, Papakonstantinou Zoe

Outreach

Aiming to foster collaboration and drive progress within the research community, the team has compiled, curated, and released financial datasets and pilot applications and participates in financial workshops and tasks.

Datasets

• MD&A + Audit Opinion dataset for Bankruptcy Prediction
• Data for table understanding
• Greek data for financial narrative summarization

Demo

• Bankruptcy Prediction using MD&A and Auditor’s Opinion

Other

• Organizing the Financial Narrative Summarisation Shared Task (FNS 2023)

The Fellows

Advisors

Georgios Paliouras  Scientific Director

Evaggelos Karkaletsis  Scientific Advisor

Denia Kanellopoulou Scientific Responsible

Public Statements

“This new venture with QUALCO is proving that “Demokritos”, a public research organisation, is mature enough to transfer technology contributing to the digital transformation of Greek businesses and to co-develop intellectual property of great added value. We are especially proud of this new partnership that will also provide the opportunity to young talented researchers to create and succeed. In the 21st century, the scientific and technological progress is inseparably connected to innovation and economic growth.”

Dr. Georgios Nounesis, Director and Chairman of the Board of NCSR “Demokritos”

“The collaboration of the two organisations is proof that our group of companies, QUALCO, is regularly investing in cutting-edge technologies, supporting at the same time the whole spectrum of the scientific community. It is our honour and our obligation to harness the work of new scientists in NCSR “Demokritos”  for conducting research in AI and Big Data scientific fields. Our goal is to showcase innovative technological solutions that will tackle effectively modern business challenges, not only in Greece but also in the global financial environment. After all, Artificial Intelligence has the power to transform financial services, affecting business models and operations.”

Orestis Tsakalotos, Chairman of QUALCO group

“Remaining loyal to our corporate identity, we enable opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship, promoting unique ideas that enhance competitiveness while creating new working positions. Through this synergy with NCSR Demokritos, we aim to bring out innovative solutions that will respond to the current global challenges of the business landscape while contributing to our country’s digital transformation.”

Olga Stamathioudaki, Corporate Affairs & Sustainability Director of Qualco Group

Team’s Testimonials

“We are proud to see the remarkable results of this pioneering initiative, which exemplifies how an R&D fellowship collaboration between an enterprise and a research organization can succeed. In Greece, where State Fellowships are limited and often lack competitive remuneration to attract or retain young talent, Industrial Fellowships provide a compelling alternative. Unlike most PhD students and postdoctoral researchers who often juggle multiple responsibilities alongside their research, this dedicated team was able to focus exclusively on their research, resulting in exceptional productivity. Moreover, the collaboration with QUALCO offered invaluable insights into real-world business needs and challenges, driving research that is both targeted and aligned with practical applications.”

Dr. Denia Kanellopoulou, Scientific Responsible for the programme

“Working with such talented colleagues and brilliant scientific advisors is a privilege. The QUALCO fellowship has provided a unique opportunity to focus on innovative machine learning methods for financial document analysis, addressing real-world challenges with clarity and purpose. This exceptional partnership along with our scientific responsible  for the program who acts as a breakwater, shielding us from external distractions, and our experienced scientific advisors have exemplified the power of combining cutting-edge research with practical applications in a supportive and inspiring environment of creativity and achievement.”

Dr. Ilias Zavitsanos, Team Lead

“Being part of the QUALCO fellowship has been a transformative experience for my PhD journey. This unique opportunity allowed me to fully dedicate my time and energy to my PhD and allow me to make great progress. The partnership provided me with exposure to the FinTech field, granting our group access to diverse financial data sources with structured data, free-form financial text, and more. Engaging in related competitions and developing methods that bridge cutting-edge research with real-world applications has been both challenging and deeply rewarding. This experience has truly accelerated my progress and broadened horizons!”

Konstantinos Bougiatiotis, PhD Student

“The QUALCO fellowship has been a cornerstone of my PhD journey, providing me with the freedom to fully dedicate myself to my research. It has offered invaluable insights into the challenges of applying machine learning in the financial domain, exposing me to diverse financial data and complex, real-world problems that merge academic rigor with practical application. This experience has been pivotal in shaping my academic achievements and professional development.”

Andreas Sideras, PhD Student

Contact us for more information: qualcofellowships (at) iit.demokritos.gr