Foreword

Dear Readers,

Summer months are often considered by the majority of school and university students as an excellent period for some complementary, in-depth education activities, and extra classes in specific areas they are interested in. At the same time, many Universities and Research Institutions see summer period as a great opportunity to disseminate and promote their work and achievements. In this context, IIT was very active this summer, and plans to be even more active beyond summer, as you will see.

In this year's 50th Summer School of NCSR "Demokritos" (06-17/07), we organized four (4) afternoon workshops and our researchers gave numerous scientific presentations, all attracting a great number of graduate and post-graduate students. Also in July (06-17/07), in collaboration with the Arsakeia-Tositseia Schools, we organized, for the second consecutive year, the SmartCamp, a summer workshop focusing on Digital Arts, Computer Animation and Robotics, a fantastic event with lots of inspiration and fun for students between 14 and 18 years old. Also, during the 3rd Hellenic Forum on Science Technology and Innovation (29/06-03/07), IIT organized four (4) workshops in the areas of Security, Digital Cultural Environments, Oil & Gas Research, and Health Services, and a panel discussion on Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

Continuing our track record from previous EU funded projects, our research personnel has been very successful in securing research funds from the very competitive H2020 Research Programme. So far, during 2015 IIT has had 13 new projects funded under the H2020 call for proposals.

And we are stepping in September with more: our presence at the 80th Thessaloniki International Fair (05-13/09), the organization of the 3rd BioASQ Workshop (09/09), and the Researcher's Night pre-event (23/09) and main event (25/09).

And beyond: we have planned continuous educational activities, we organize school visits during the whole school year, we invite all children from 10 to 15 years old to visit us in the context of our new educational programs in Robotics, starting early October till the end of May (stay tuned to learn more on this). Graduate and post-graduate students can also attend the continuous lecture series of IIT and those who might be interested in doing a MSc or BSc with us, there are 59 different topics to choose from, all available on our website.

Finally, because hard work is always rewarded, we should mention here our researchers' 3rd place at International Competition on Author Profiling, 2nd place in a competition for anti-fraud applications, and that IIT's solution "Synaisthisi" was between the top 10 solutions at the Business IT Excellence Contest.

Stelios C. A. Thomopoulos, IIT Director

Research

Public R&D dissemination

6-17 July: Four IIT workshops during the 50th Summer School of NCSR "Demokritos"
The Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications (IIT) participated in the 50th Summer School of NCSR "D" by organizing with great success the following four (4) afternoon workshops: "Anechoic chamber", "Using brain-machine interface device to model and measure human creativity", "Remote controlled & autonomous navigation of robotic platform", "Smart room". Read more

16 July: WiCom research work selected as "featured paper" in IET Electronics Letters
The paper "Connecting Wearable Textile Transmission Lines: All-Textile Fabrication Solutions and Design Techniques" by A. Tsolis, A.A. Alexandridis, W.G. Whittow and J.C. Vardaxoglou, was published as the "featured paper" in IET Electronics Letters, Volume 51, Issue 15.
Read more

3 more years for the BioASQ Challenge
IIT will collaborate with NIH/NLM, Atypon and Viseo for the continuation of the BioASQ Challenge. BioASQ will be supported for three more years by an NIH/NLM conference grant. Atypon and Viseo announced their decision to become BioASQ sponsors. Read more

Selected Publications
• "A segmentation-free word spotting method for historical printed documents", Pattern Analysis and Applications, IIT authors: T. Konidaris, A. L. Kesidis, B. Gatos.
• "An Event Calculus for Event Recognition", IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IIT authors: A. Artikis, G. Paliouras.
• "An overview of the BIOASQ large-scale biomedical semantic indexing and question answering competition", BMC Bioinformatics, IIT authors: A. Krithara, S. Petridis, G. Paliouras.
• "Long-Term Marine Traffic Monitoring for Environmental Safety in the Aegean Sea", 36th International Symposium on Remote Sensing of Environment, T. Giannakopoulos, S. Gyftakis, E. Charou, S. Perantonis, IIT authors: Z. Nivolianitou, I. Koromila and A. Makrygiorgos.
• "On-demand beaconing: Periodic and adaptive policies for effective routing in diverse mobile topologies", Ad Hoc Networks, IIT authors: I. Manolopoulos, K. Kontovasilis, I. Stavrakakis, S. C.A. Thomopoulos.
• "Optimized Network Coding Efficiency under QoS Constraints in Two-Way Relay Networks with Timeouts", IEEE International Conference on Communications, IIT authors: E.C. Davri, K. Kontovasilis, C. Skianis.
Complete list of Publications

Projects' Newsletters: Want to stay in touch with our R&D projects' activities?

New R&D Projects
• CHARISMA (Converged Heterogeneous Advanced 5G Cloud-RAN Architecture for Intelligent and Secure Media Access) (started)
• datAcron (Big Data Analytics for Time Critical Mobility Forecasting) (accepted)
• DOGANA (aDvanced sOcial enGineering And vulNerability Assessment framework) (started)
• HOBBIT (HOlistic Benchmarking of BIg linked daTa) (accepted)
• SESAME (Small cEllS coordinAtion for Multi-tenancy and Edge services) (started)
• SONATA (Service Programing and Orchestration for Virtualized Software Networks) (started)

List of IIT FP7 projects (in pdf)

Events

Don't miss the Researchers' Night 2015!
- 23 September, 10h00-22h00: pre-event at NCSR "Demokritos". A day full of sports and ... science! "A healthy mind in a healthy body", in practice, with several sport events, and visits to selected labs and to the permanent exibition of the NCSR "D" scientific achievements.
- 25 September, 18h00-24h00: the main event at the Foundation of the Hellenic World. IIT will also be there! The Researchers' Night is a mega event which takes place every year simultaneously in several hundred cities all over Europe and beyond. Whether with family, friends, your school, or on your own, you will find yourself exploring science in engaging ways.
Read more

29 June-3 July: 3rd Hellenic Forum on Science Technology and Innovation at the Campus of NCSR "Demokritos"
The Forum covered a broad range of topics including ICT, Nanotechnology, Energy & Environment, Life Sciences and Accelerator Technologies for Society.
- The Integrated Systems Laboratory (ISL) of IIT was present with a 3-day Agenda, attracting important public attention by covering 3 very popular sections relating to ICT: "Security & Cyber Defence", "Immersion Digital Technologies, Culture & Tourism" and "Energy & Environment". Read more
- The Software and Knowledge Engineering Lab (SKEL) of IIT organised a panel discussion on Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Read more
- Dr. H. Papadopoulos organized the workshop "ICT for Health Services, Assistive Living and Wellbeing". Read more

13-14 June: 2nd place in a competition for anti-fraud applications
Congratulations to J. Katakis and A. Grivas from SKEL that as members of the group «HUAckers», won the 2nd place in #Apodeiksi hackathon, one of the biggest competitions for hackers, programmers and developers in Greece. Read more

28-31 May: ISL at the European Maritime Day
The European Maritime Day was celebrated this year in Athens and Piraeus with actions, exhibitions and conferences from 28 to 31 May 2015. The Integrated Systems Laboratory (ISL) of IIT participated in the exhibition hosted at Megaron - the Athens Concert Hall - on 28 & 29 May. ISL presented the Oculus-Sea platform, a maritime border surveillance system developed in the framework of the European project PERSEUS. Read more

3rd place at International Competition on Author Profiling for SKEL
The 3rd best performing team at the 3rd International Competition on Author Profiling was A. Grivas, A. Krithara and G. Giannakopoulos from SKEL, IIT. The task was about predicting an author's demographics from her writing. ΙΙΤ participated for the first time and took the 3rd place out of 22 teams. Read more

Synaisthisi in the top 10 solutions at the Business IT Excellence Contest
The Business IT Excellence Contest (by OTE/Cosmote) was the area where the best Internet of Things solutions for businesses come together to find the most efficient ones. IIT's solution "Synaisthisi" was qualified after the public voting. It was ranked 7th between the 15 solutions with the most votes. Read more

IIT participated in numerous Conferences, Workshops and Events
During the first quarter of 2015 researchers from IIT participated in numerous conferences and workshops, like ESWC 2015, HIP 2015, ICDAR 2015, ICSEC 2015, IJCAI 2015, NAACL 2015, PETRA 2015, UMAP 2015, WIMS 2015, WWW2015.
Conferences & Workshops IIT participated in

• 25-31 July: Ms Parde, a member of the team whose paper was awarded at the end of IRSS 2014, presented their paper "Grounding the Meaning of Words through Vision and Interactive Gameplay" at the 24th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence - IJCAI 2015, which took place at Buenos Aires. Read more
• 15-16 June: BigDataEurope workshops. SKEL organized on June 15 in Brussels a workshop titled "Big Data in the H2020 Societal Challenge Climate action, environment, resource efficiency and raw materials Workshop" and participated in the Workshop "Big Data in the H2020 Societal Challenge Secure, Clean and Efficient energy Workshop", which took place on June 16 also in Brussels. Read more
• 3 June: A lecture about "Data Journalism" was given by Dr G. Giannakopoulos (SKEL) in the context of the course "Design and development of digital media and multi-media" at the Department of Communication and Media Studies of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Read more

Education

6-17 July: SmartCamp - 2nd consecutive year of success
The SmartCamp workshop for children 14-18 took place with great success for the second consecutive year, this time in the premises of NCSR Demokritos. The SmartCamp summer workshop focuses on Digital Arts, Computer Animation and Robotics and was organized in two circles by the Integrated Systems Laboratory (ISL) of IIT in collaboration with the Educational Society (Arsakeia - Tositseia Schools of Psychiko).
Read more

Lecture series at IIT - The IIT Seminar series gives the opportunity to postgraduate students, to new or existing members of the Institute's labs, to internal and external (invited) speakers to present their work and establish collaborations.
List of upcoming and past seminars

PhD thesis completed, congratulations to:
- Kosmopoulos Aris, "Large scale hierarchical classification with limited training instances per category", July 2015. Read more

2015-16: topics for MSc/BSc Theses and internships by IIS
See all the topics proposed by the Intelligent Information Systems (IIS) Division of IIT, for MSc/BSc theses and internships for 2014-15, in scientific areas like algorithms, artificial intelligence, machine learning, image analysis, and many more.

• Internships completed by: Κostopoulos Victor-Efstathios, Zacharakis Dimitrios, Zamparas Velissarios, Manou Evgenia, Lissari Irene, Tavoularis Nikolaos, Kriekouki Ioanna, Kaliakatsos Dimitrios, Katsampos Spyridon, Zerva Christina. Read more

Miscellaneous

ISL representing NSCR "D" has joined EOS
In the context of its extended activities in Security R&D, the Integrated Systems Laboratory (ISL) of the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications, representing NCSR "D", has joined the European Organisation for Security (EOS) in June 2015.
Read more

3 & 9 July: Chinese Delegation visited NCSR "D", MoU signed
A Memorandum of Understanding, concerning the establishment of R&D cooperation between the National Center for Scientific Research "Demokritos" and Henan Academy of Sciences, Institute of Applied Physics Co., Ltd., was signed between the Chinese Delegation and the NCSR "D" authorities.
Read more

15 job openings at IIT
IIT keeps on expanding: fifteen (15) new job openings at IIT were announced between May and August 2015.
Read more

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