Foreword

Dear Readers,

Another year went by with a lot of success stories for IIT. In particular the conclusion of the "Synaisthisi" project in 2015 marked a milestone in the implementation of an Institute-wide project that involved all the labs in a well-coordinated effort. All the members of the IIT "Synaisthisi" team deserve congratulations for their excellent cooperation and hard work during the last two years. The Platform for Indoor Geocoding & Navigation and Smart Energy Management Services, the integrated outcome of "Synaisthisi", is a promising set of tools and achievement of our Institute in the emerging and challenging era of "Internet of Things". It is also a proof that people from different research areas can work flawlessly together and achieve significant results.

The Fall of 2015 was a very busy semester for IIT, with new research projects, several R&D dissemination activities, numerous conferences and workshops, important research publications, seminars and lectures, pan-European events like the Researcher's Night, 1 PhD and 5 internships completed on-campus, 26 job openings and the announcement of 6 new PhD scholarships.

I would like to conclude by wishing everybody a creative, healthy and successful 2016, during which the actions of IIT strive at making a positive difference in the areas of Telecommunications, Networks, Web Technologies, Security, Intelligent Systems, and Digital Immersive Environments.

Stelios C. A. Thomopoulos, IIT Director

Research

Public R&D dissemination

Publication of the Book "User Community Discovery", edited by Paliouras, G., Papadopoulos, S., Vogiatzis, D., Kompatsiaris, Y., at the HCI Series, Springer. The book redefines community discovery in the new world of Online Social Networks and Web 2.0 applications, through real-world problems and applications in the context of the Web, pointing out the current and future challenges of the field.
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20 November: "Robotic support for independent living of the elderly" (acronym: RADIO), our new H2020 project, was promoted by the DigitalAgendaEU. Pilots of the RADIO ecosystem are planned in two clinical sites (Italy, Spain) and several home environments (Greece).
Read more

Publications: Books, Journal articles, Conference papers

New R&D Projects
• datAcron (Big Data Analytics for Time Critical Mobility Forecasting) (started)
• HOBBIT (HOlistic Benchmarking of BIg linked daTa) (started)
Complete list of R&D Projects

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

Events

22 December: the final "Synaisthisi" project Workshop has been held at IIT's premises. The integrated "Synaisthisi" IoT Platform for Smart Energy Management Services was demonstrated. All "Synaisthisi" teams presented the modules they developed, as well as their work and steps towards platform integration.
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17 December: Dr C. Spyropoulos with the speech "The role of AIOTI in Business Value" and Dr G. Pierris with his talk "The connected ecosystem" participated, from IIT, to the "Internet of Things Conference - Extract Business Value out of the IoT", an event organized by Boussias Conferences, in Athens.
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25 November: "MagnetoElectric materials in reconfigurable Antennas" (MAGELLAN) Workshop was successfully organised by the Wireless Communications (WiCom) Laboratory, in the context of Thales project, at the NCSR premises.
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25 November: Dr C. Spyropoulos from IIT, was invited to the panel "The state - from digitizing to a viable, sustainable future (public sector - infrastructure networks, environment, e-health)", at the Internet of Things (IoT) Conference organised by Naftemboriki, at the Divani Caravel Hotel, in Athens.
Read more

The "Synaisthisi" IoT Tour
- 3-5 Nov: Synaisthisi team, with its Internet of Things (IoT) platform for smart energy management services, participated at the European Utility Week (EUW15), in Vienna, Austria.
- 27-29 Oct: Synaisthisi team participated in IoT360, the International Summit on Internet of Things (IoT), in Rome, Italy, organised by the European Aliance for Innovation Channel.
- 19 Oct: Synaisthisi IoT team travelled to Lisbon, Portugal, to participate in ICT2015, the biggest EU event on ICT R&I in 2015.
- 1^st Oct: "Home energy reduction: Simulation Game" was presented at the SEYN Academy 2.0 by C. Akasiadis from the Synaisthisi team.
- 16-18 Sep: Synaisthisi team travelled to Barcelona to participate in IoT Solutions World Congress 2015, the first global event focusing on the crossroads between IoT and Industry.
Read more

1st October: ProFouND Stay Strong Stay Steady Campaign. To celebrate International Older Person's Day, the Prevention of Falls Network for Dissemination (ProFouND) consortium, delivered flash mobs and/or took part in strength and balance exercise classes to raise awareness of falls prevention. IIT took part by organising a flash mob in Philadelphia's Municipality "K.A.P.I." with 25 older people taking part.
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23 & 25 September: The Researcher's Night celebrated its 10 years. More than 8.000 individuals came to browse science and art exhibitions, see experiments, participate in workshops, watch performances, concerts and interesting lectures. NCSR Demokritos hosted one of the Pre-Events, on Wednesday 23/09, while the Main Event was organised at the "Hellenic Cosmos", the Cultural Centre of the Foundation of the Hellenic World, on Friday 25/09.
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9 September: the 3rd BioASQ Workshop was successfully organised by IIT's BioASQ team, from SKEL, in the context of the CLEF 2015 conference, at the Météo France International conference center, in Bordeaux, France.
Read more

IIT participated in numerous Conferences, Workshops and Events
During the first quarter of 2015 researchers from IIT participated in numerous conferences like CLEF 2015, CNSM 2015, DEXA 2015, EANN 2015, ECML PKDD 2015, European Data Forum 2015, EUW 2015, ICT 2015, IEEE BigData 2015, ISPA 2015, MMS 2015, ODI Summit 2015, PCI 2015, SEMANTICS 2015, SLSP 2015, and workshops, like the Data-driven Innovations for Better Policies International Workshop, the Federated Data Querying Workshop, the SIMBAD 2015 Workshop, the Stream Reasoning Workshop.
Conferences & Workshops IIT participated in

• 7-8 December: Dr H. Papadopoulos was invited to discuss proposals for Synergies between Action Groups of the European Innovation Partnership (EIP) on Active and Healthy Ageing (AHA), at the AHA Conference, at Montpellier, France. Read more
• 12 October: in the meeting of the Bioethics Committee of NCSR "Demokritos", Dr H. Papadopoulos presented the experiments proposed within the framework of the study entitled ReAAL ("Realising AAL Services in the Greek Territory"). Read more
• 30 September: The Software and Knowledge Engineering Laboratory (SKEL) co-organised the "Big Data in Secure Societies -1st Workshop", in Brussels, Belgium. Read more
• 23 September: Workshop disseminating the results of the European project GRANKIT organised by Net Media Lab. Read more
• 18 September: Dr Konstantopoulos and Mr Mouchakis from SKEL co-organised the "SemaGrow Hackathon on the power of Linked Data in Agriculture and Food Safety", in Vienna, Austria. Read more
• 2-4 September: Dr Giannakopoulos organised the "MultiLing Special Session" in the context of the "16th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue - SIGDIAL 2015", in Prague, Czech Republic. Read more

Education

"Here come the robots!" a Roboskel driven educational program for elementary-to-high school students. What is a robot? Where do robots come from? What robots can do? Such questions, many answers, as well as new interesting queries will be born about the past, present and future of robotics, through this Educational Program organised by the group Roboskel of the Software and Knowledge Engineering Laboratory (SKEL) of IIT. Due to high demand from Schools, the Program was extended, with extra sessions scheduled through summer 2016.
Read more

26-27 September: "Special Education and ICT: Psychometric Tools and Methodologies of Intervention".
Net Media Lab organized a hugely successful series of 8 free seminars, with more than 3000 teachers, psychologists and other specialists attending the lectures.
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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:
- Manolopoulos Ioannis, "Methodologies for Effective Self-adaptive Decisions in Routing, Signaling, Cooperation, and Other Operations in Diverse Mobile Networks", December 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: Kontopoulos Ioannis, Pantzaras Marios, Potsi Marina, Gkyrtis Dimitris & Charisopoulos Vasilis Read more

Miscellaneous

26 job openings and 6 PhD scholarships at IIT!
IIT keeps on expanding: twenty six (26) new job openings and six (6) new PhD scholarships were announced by IIT between September and December 2015.
Complete list of job openings

• 19 November: Prof. Xuefu Zhang gave a talk at the IIT premises, where he briefly presented the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) and the Agricultural Information Institute (AII) of China. Read more.
• 14 October: several articles in the Greek Press mention the presence of 4 Greek Research Centers in the list of top 50 in the EU, as reported in the Seventh FP7 Monitoring Report 2013, DG Research and Innovation - Evaluation Unit (A.5). I.e. see article in newspaper "to vima".
• ISL goes social: the Integrated Systems Laboratory (ISL) has expanded its social media presence with the launch of official social media accounts. Follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter for the latest ISL updates. Read more
• wayGoo indoor navigation app from ISL has now a Facebook page! Have a look and follow the page.

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