Foreword

Dear Readers,

Being a member of the Institute for many years, I feel privileged to take over the responsibility of serving it as its Director.

During the previous years, IIT achieved significant success in the attracting of funding via EU and national projects, continuing its growth and establishing its position in the research areas of artificial intelligence and telecommunication networks. The collaboration between the Institute's laboratories as well as between IIT and other NCSR-D Institutes was intensified, with multiple common initiatives and projects. The development of the Institute's educational and social pursuits was also successful; the establishment of joint PhD programmes with renowned international universities, the organization of focused cross-institutional MSc programmes and the further development of broader educational actions were highlights of the period. The same holds for IIT's relations with local and foreign industry players, as many collaborations and actions were organised and extended.

There are significant opportunities for further growth and development for IIT. Based on our strengths and potential, we will have to pose additional targets to ensure the Institute's sustainability and growth. The years to come will be very challenging in many aspects. The new IIT building, the expansion and improvement of our infrastructure, the extension of research synergies within the Institute and the strengthening of the multi-disciplinary, data-driven research in collaboration with other Institutes, along with the more efficient exposure of research outcomes, are among our major challenges for the next years. I am certain that we will manage all together to meet successfully these challenges!

With my best wishes for a healthy and productive new year!

Dr. Vangelis Karkaletsis, Director-elect, IIT

Research

5 October: another succesfull Researchers' Night
The National Centre for Scientific Research "Demokritos" (NCSR-D) succesfully hosted, once again, the European Researchers' Night 2018, on Friday, 5th of October. The event presented science and researchers in different kinds of workshops, panel discussions and exhibitions. With the WayGoo app, offered by ISL Lab, all the information about all events was easily and quickly available to visitors. Net Media Lab organised the event "Programme an Edison Robot" which was addressed to 9 to 12 years old children. Read more

More in Research

Six (6) new research projects for SKEL Lab

The Software and Knowledge Engineering Laboratory (SKEL), IIT, and the Molecular Genetics & Cytogenetics Lab, IPRETEA, NCSR-D, have already begun cooperation within the 'Hellenic Network for Precision Medicine' project. Furthermore, four (4) new H2020 projects (AI4EU, IS-ENES3, INFORE, ExtremeEarth) and another (1) Google DNI project (DataStories), have been accepted. Read more

Honorary Recognition by Elsevier

Dr. C. Spyropoulos from SKEL Lab, IIT, received the "Certificate for Outstanding Contribution in Reviewing" by Elsevier Publishing, in recognition to his contributions made to the quality of the journal "Artificial Intelligence in Medicine". Read more

Publications: Books, Journal articles, Conference papers

New R&D Projects
• AI4EU (A European AI On Demand Platform and Ecosystem) (accepted)
• CODESKILLS4ROBOTICS (Promoting Coding and STEM Skills Through Robotics: Supporting Primary Schools to Develop Inclusive Digital Strategies for All) (started)
• DataStories (DataStories-Google DNI) (started)
• ESTIA (Disaster Management Platform for Cultural Heritage Sites) (started)
• ExtremeEarth (From Copernicus Big Data to Extreme Earth Analytics) (accepted)
• Hellenic Network for Precision Medicine (Hellenic Network for Precision Medicine, Subproject 5: «Infrastructures, Tools, and Systems for Organization, Processing, and Analysis of Biomedical Data) (started)
• INFORE (Interactive Extreme-Scale Analytics and Forecasting) (accepted)
• IS-ENES3 (Infrastructure for the European Network for Earth System modelling - Phase 3) (accepted)
• MeLDE (Media Literacy in the Digitalised Era: Supporting Teachers Through a Whole-School Approach) (started)
Complete list of R&D Projects

Events

18-21 December: SLT2018 - International acclaim for conference organised by SKEL Lab
IEEE's long awaited prestigious International conference on Spoken Language Technology (SLT2018) was held with great success in Athens, December 2018 for the first time. The conference, which was co-chaired by V. Karkaletsis, SKEL, II&T and organised by the SKEL team, gathered 400 scientists and business experts from around the world had the opportunity to meet and discuss with the leaders in the field, attend poster sessions and keynote speeches. The highlight of the week-long event was the Gala Dinner which was held at The Acropolis Museum in the presence of GSRT Secretary, P. Kyprianidou and NCSR-D Director, G.Nounesis amongst other esteemed guests. Read more

18 December: ISL Lab in CY CISE Workshop

The CY CISE project consortium, coordinated by the Integrated Systems Laboratory (ISL) of IIT, organised a workshop to present project's final results and outcomes, and discover exploitation opportunities. The event was hosted by the KIOS reseach center at the University of Cyprus in Nicosia. Read more

29 November-2 December: Demo for Orchestration of 5G Network Services in MEF by MNL Lab

Media Networks Laboratory (MNL) of IIT in cooperation with NEC Netcracker presented in the annual MEF 2018 event in Los Angeles USA, a demo for Orchestration of 5G Network Services in the frame of MEF 3.0 Implementation Project. The demo was deployed over the Athens5GLink infrastructure hosted in NCSR-D campus featuring 4G evolution and 5G features. The scenario involved the real-time deployment of a MEF Service (i.e. EVC) for first responders over a 5G ready infrastructure. Read more

29-30 November: SKEL Lab at the "Open Science in Greek Research" Symposium

IIT participated at the Symposium "Open Science in Greek Research: Research Procedures, Research Data, Collaborations" which was held in Athens, Greece. Dr. V. Karkaletsis, head of SKEL Lab, presented the common requirements of Research infrastructures. Read more

26-27 November: IIT at Workshop on the enhancement of structural competitiveness

Dr. V. Karkaletsis, SKEL Lab, gave a speech at the two-day workshop "Research, Innovation and Entrepreneurship: A new agenda for the enhancement of structural competitiveness", organised by GFOSS at the Goethe-Institut in Athens, Greece. Read more

24-25 November: VR@GR - ISL at Onassis Cultural Centre

"VR@GR Virtual Reality - Research & applications in Greece today", an event dedicated to Virtual Reality took place at Onassis Cultural Centre (Stegi), in collaboration with the National Kapodistrian University of Athens. Integrated Systems Lab (ISL Lab) participated in the on-going effort to promote interactive technologies in Greece, in a time when the perspectives and possible applications of VR technology attract the interest of many people. Read more

20-21 November: ISL at the European Parliament

FocusLocus project was proud to announce its participation in an exhibition at the European Parliament in Brussels. The European Parliament, under the initiative of Greek MEP Eva Kaili, offered the opportunity to promote EU funded research projects in the area of assistive technologies, technologies enhancing accessibility to the internet and serious gaming. Read more

11 & 12 October: Presentation by MNL Lab of the 5G platform of IIT in ITU forum

MNL Lab of IIT presented in the ITU forum in Athens Greece, the 5G-ready platform within the campus of NCSRD. The platform is supported by the EU funded projects 5G-ESSENCE and 5GENESIS. The event was organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), in collaboration with the Ministry for Digital Policy, Telecommunications and Media of Greece. The presentation was followed by discussion concerning the opportunities related to 5G and challenges to be addressed in infrastructure roll-out, spectrum management and broadcasting. Read more

25 & 27 September: SKEL Lab travelled to Canada

Dr. G. Paliouras, SKEL Lab, IIT, travelled to Canada, as an invited speaker. His first stop was in Toronto at the Fields Institute, on September 25, where he gave a talk about "Data integration and analysis for personalized medicine" whilst focusing on iASiS project progress. Next stop was at Dalhousie University with a talk on "Complex Event Recognition for Maritime Monitoring", where he presented research results of the Complex Event Recognition (CER) group of IIT. Read more

Europe gets to know "Track and Know" project

Dr. N. Katzouris, SKEL Lab, IIT, presented the "Track & Know" project in three events, the European Conference on "Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases", between 10-14 September, in Dublin, Ireland, the 28th International Conference on "Inductive Logic Programming", from 2 to 4 September, in Ferrara, Italy, and the 5th Workshop on "Probabilistic Logic Programming", on 1st September, in Ferrara, Italy. Read more

IIT participated in numerous scientific events

Between September and December 2018 researchers from IIT participated in Conferences like 'AGU 2018', 'Complex Networks 2018', 'DI4R 2018', 'EBDVF 2018', 'ECCB 2018', 'ECML PKDD 2018', 'ICRI 2018', 'ICT 2018', 'IEEE SLT 2018', 'ILP 2018', 'ITU Forum', 'MEF 2018', 'SPLASH 2018', 'TIME 2018' & Workshops like 'Access to Healthcare', 'CY CISE', 'PLP 2018', 'Research, Innovation & Entrepreneurship', 'VR@GR'.

• 10-14 December: Dr. I. Klampanos from SKEL Lab participated in the AGU 2018 Fall Meeting which was held in Washington, D.C., USA. Read more
• 11-13 December: SKEL Lab participated in the 7th International Conference on Complex Networks and Their Applications, which took place in Cambridge, UK. Read more
• 3-7 December: Net Media Lab participated in the Short-Term Staff Training Event in the framework of the Erasmus+ project "Seniors Go Digital: Promoting Inclusive Strategies for Disadvantaged Seniors", in Nicosia, Cyprus. Read more
• 4-6 December: Dr. G. Petasis from SKEL Lab participated in ICT 2018 "Imagine Digital - Connect Europe", which took place in Vienna, Austria. Read more
• 12-14 November: Dr. V. Karkaletsis and Dr. S. Konstantopoulos from SKEL Lab participated in the European Big Data Value Forum 2018, in Vienna, Austria. Read more
• 4-9 November: SKEL Lab participated in the ACM SIGPLAN conference on Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH 2018) which took place in Boston, USA. Read more
• 30 October: Dr. A. Krithara from SKEL Lab presented the BigMedilytics project in the Horizon 2020 - EU Partnering event on digital transformation in health & care, which took place in Brussels, Belgium. Read more
• 28 October: Dr. H. Papadopoulos from IIT was invited to the Workshop "Access to Healthcare" in Tavira, Portugal. Read more
• 15-17 October: Mr. G. Athanasopoulos from SKEL Lab participated in the 25th International Symposium on Temporal Representation and Reasoning (TIME 2018), in Warsaw, Poland. Read more
• 9-11 October: Dr. V. Karkaletsis from SKEL Lab participated in the Digital Infrastructures for Research (DI4R) conference which was held at the University of Lisbon campus in Lisbon, Portugal. Read more
• 12-14 September: Dr. I. Klampanos from SKEL Lab participated in the International Conference for Research Infrastructures (ICRI) 2018, in Vienna, Austria. Read more
• 8-12 September: Mr. A. Nentidis and Mr. G. Bikos from SKEL Lab participated in the 17th European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB18), in Athens, Greece. Read more

Education

IIT offered ten (10) new scholarships for PhD dissertation, in collaboration with Universities in USA and Canada. Researchers from SKEL lab will be supervising the candidates, in research areas like AI, Robotics, NLP, Big Data, Bioinformatics. Read more

1st October: Second Academic Year of MSc Data Science programme kicks off

Dr. V. Karkaletsis, Director of the MSc programme, welcomed new students to their 1st semester as well as old ones entering their 2nd year of studies in the 3rd semester. The event took place at the Library of NCSR-D with instructors outlining the courses for the 1st and 3rd semesters. 2nd year students were given a brief presentation of the proposed topics for their upcoming MSc Theses. Read more

22 September: Free Seminar on Special Education and ICTs

Successful organization by Net Media Lab, IIT, of the free seminar "Special Education and ICTs: The Autism Spectrum" which took place twice (in the morning and in the afternoon) on Saturday 22 September 2018 at the Main Auditorium of NCSR "Demokritos", with 1600 registrations. Read more

22 September: Multiplier Event for Project primeTECH

Net Media Lab successfully organized a Multiplier Event for the Erasmus+ Project primeTECH (Promoting Technology Enhanced Teaching in Primary Schools), at the Congress Center of NCSR "Demokritos". Almost 100 people attended the event, most of which were Primary School Teachers, having the opportunity to learn about project's results and to interact with the e-platform. 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

2018-19: 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 2018-19, in scientific areas like algorithms, artificial intelligence, machine learning, image analysis, and many more.

• 28 September: BSc thesis completed, titled "Flexible, efficient and customizable networking and routing of sensor data", by E. Trapezanlidou, AUEB, Dept. of Informatics, supervised by Dr. K. Kontovasilis, NeL Lab, IIT. Read more
• Internships completed by: Mavrogeorgis N., Tzioti D., Skordili C. - L., Tsili A., Platis K., Malfa I. -A., Koutsodimitropoulou A., Katseli D., Mpeis S., Tsako M., Sarlas A.,Mpakos P., Giannakis K.,Papoutsis G., Mpallas R. & Sevastopoulos C. Read more

Miscellaneous

SKEL Lab is now a member of the Big Data Value Association

The Software and Knowledge Engineering Laboratory (SKEL Lab) of the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications (IIT), NCSR-D, is proud to announce its membership in the Big Data Value Association (BVDA) at Associate Member level. Read more

International Distinction for Net Media Lab

A Net Media Lab's study - article has been included in a CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development) Strategic Study under the title: Rapid evidence review. Impact of artificial intelligence, robotics and automation technologies on work, targeting Global Labor Market. Read more

• 6 new job openings. IIT keeps on expanding: six (6) new job openings were announced by IIT between September and December 2018. Complete list of job openings

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