Foreword

2013 was a very good year for our Institute!

IIT Researchers themselves are heavily involved in communicating the results of R&D projects to the media and the general public. The Researcher's Night was a clear success, our demonstrations and simulations attracted great attention. At the same time, a number of important Press articles on IIT’s activities confirm this success.

A clear indication that our efforts have started bearing fruits is the growing number of scientific and technical R&D projects where IIT is coordinator or partner. A direct result of this: more than 35 job openings at IIT and 7 new PhD scholarships were announced between September and December 2013 (and others continue to come early this year!).

At the same time, IIT widens and strengthens its Research Collaborations with Universities in the US.

Stelios Thomopoulos, IIT Director

Research

Public R&D dissemination

29 September: tribute to iRescue platform of ISL from "Kathimerini" newspaper
A whole-page article, describing the 3D crowd behavior simulator iRescue, designed by researchers at the Integrated Systems Laboratory (ISL) of the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications, was hosted in the Sunday, 29 Sep. edition of the newspaper "Kathimerini".
Read more

19-27 September: the robotic platforms of SKEL in the newspaper "Ta NEA" and the "Epikaira" magazine
Indigo, Sek and Ibn Sina, the robotic platforms of RoboSKEL were presented by the newspaper "Ta NEA" (27/9) and by "Epikaira" magazine (19-25/9). RoboSKEL (Robotic software and knowledge elucidation) is a testing and dissemination platform for a variety of technologies: adaptive dialogue management, pattern recognition from range data, speaker diarization.
Read more

Publications: Books, Journal articles, Conference papers

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

New R&D Projects
• AF3 (Advanced Forest Fire Fighting) (started)
• CYBERroad (Development of the Cybercrime and Cyber-terrorism Reseach Roadmap) (started)
• EU CISE 2020 (ΕU Common Information Sharing Environment 2020) (accepted)
• OldDocPro (Novel Techniques to Advance the Frontiers of Old Greek Document Recognition) (accepted)
• REVEAL (REVEALing hidden concepts in Social Media) (started)
• SUNNY (Smart UNmanned aerial vehicle sensor Network for detection of border crossing and illegal entrY) (accepted)
• T-NOVA (Network Functions as-a-Service over Virtualised Infrastructures) (started)

List of IIT FP7 projects (in pdf)

Events

11 February: Workshop in the context of Safer Internet Day 2014
Safer Internet Day 2014 will be celebrated on 11 February 2014. The strapline for the campaign is "Let's create a better internet together". On this occasion, IIT co-organizes with Saferinternet.gr an open workshop at NCSR "Demokritos". Concerning IIT, the Workshop is co-organized within the framework of the Institute's activities at the European Thematic Network POSCON.
Read more

BioASQ - Call for Participation to the second Challenge on large-scale biomedical semantic indexing and question answering. Read more
First BioASQ Challenge Awards - see the winners of the 1st BioASQ Challenge
27 September: a very exciting 1^st BioASQ Workshop: the first BioASQ workshop took place in UPV, Valencia, Spain, as a post-workshop to CLEF 2013. It was attended by more than 30 people, who contributed to a lively full-day programme, comprising 9 talks and a panel discussion. Read more

18 December: TASS field test at AIA
TASS consortium together with VERINT (TASS consortium coordinator) and AIA (Athens International Airport) have presented a Field Test of the TASS system in Athens International Airport where the system is deployed and runs. The purpose of this event was to demonstrate TASS capabilities against simulated security threats.
Read more

14-15 December: Athens Green Hackathon 2013
Athens Green Hackathon 2013 is the second in a series of events where hackers and developers meet to create and apply new ideas, targeting a sustainable and healthier future! One of the main goals of a Green Hackathon is to showcase the potential of Open Data and APIs that make access to environmental, agricultural and biodiversity data easier.
Read more

12 December: the "SEMAGROW and agINFRA stakeholder meeting"
The Greek partners of the agINFRA and SemaGrow projects (Agro-Know Technologies and IIT, NCSR Demokritos) organized a focused discussion on how agricultural data communities may fit into the research infrastructures' agenda of H2020.
Read more

19 November: SciFY awarded!
SciFY, non-profit Organization (NPO), co-operating closely with IIT, has been awarded within Quality Islets 2013, a bi-annual competition that rewards original collective activities by non-profit organisations.
Read more

6-8 November: USEFIL project invited to showcase its results at ICT 2013
IIT is coordinating USEFIL (Unobstrusive Smart Environments For Independent Living) project (FP7-ICT-2011-7) which is invited to showcase its results at ICT 2013 in Vilnius.
Read more

12 October: PServer WorkShop #2
The 2^nd PServer WorkShop, titled "Introducing PServer to the community: the research, the tool, the practical benefits for all", was organized by IIT and SciFY at the premises of IIT. PServer (Personalization Server) is an opensource application developed at the Software and Knowledge Engineering Laboratory (SKEL) of IIT, offered to everyone, for free, through the Intelligent Software Solutions (ISS) laboratory of IIT and SciFY.
Read more, find slides and videos

27 September: Researchers Night 2013 - Discovering the unknown world of the researcher
Huge success for the "Researchers 'Night 2013'. The participation exceeded all expectations, more than 7000 visitors of all ages passed by the National Centre for Scientific Research "Demokritos" on the evening of September 27.
Read more

• 12-15 December: WiCom participated in the ISSPIT 2013. The Wireless Communications (WiCom) Laboratory participated in the IEEE International Symposium on Signal Processing and Information Technology (ISSPIT 2013). Read more
• 7-15 December: SKEL was present at ICDM 2013 and the iPerform meeting. Dr. A. Krithara from the Software and Knowledge Engineering Laboratory (SKEL) participated in the "IEEE International Conference on Data Mining series" (ICDM2013), the iPerform meeting and visited UNT and UTD. Read more
• 9-11 December: MNL participated at ISM 2013. Dr. E. Kafetzakis from the Media Networks Laboratory (MNL) presented a full paper at IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia (ISM), held at California, USA. Read more
• 10 December: ISL participated at ValueSec's final conference in Brussels. Dr. D. M. Kyriazanos from the Integrated Systems Laboratory (ISL) has been invited as PACT Decision Support System WorkPackage Leader and Privacy Expert to the ValueSec project Final Conference. Read more
• 11-12 November: WiCom lab participated in LAPC 2013. Wireless Communications Lab, National Technical University of Athens and Loughborough University, presented a joint research work in the 9th Loughborough Antennas & Propagation Conference (LAPC 2013). Read more
• 7-8 October: NeL participated in ETSI workshop. The Telecommunications Network Laboratory (NeL) participated in the ETSI Workshop on Environmental Impact Assessment and Energy Efficiency, held in Athens. Read more
• 4 October: invited talk about NeL's research results at the University of Edinburgh. Dr. K. Kontovasilis from NeL delivered an invited talk on recent results about "Performance, Dimensioning and Interference Tradeoffs for Two-tier Wireless Networks" at the University of Edinburgh. Read more
• 16-19 September: SKEL participated at EC-TEL 2013 Conference. Dr. P. Karampiperis from SKEL organized and participated in the "Workshop on Computational tools fostering creativity in learning processes" during the European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (ECTEL 2013 Conference) in Pafos, Cyprus. Read more
• 11-13 September: SKEL participated at ICEBE 2013. Dr. G. Vetsikas from SKEL participated in the 10th IEEE International Conference on E-Business Engineering and had a research collaboration with the University of Southampton. Read more
• 8-11 September: NeL participated in IEEE PIMRC 2013. Dr. I. Giannoulakis from NeL took part in the 24th Annual IEEE Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications, (IEEE PIMRC2013), held in London, UK. Read more

Education

12-20 November: IIT to enhance Research Collaborations with Universities in the US
Dr. C. D. Spyropoulos (ISS) and Dr. V. Karkaletsis (SKEL) travelled to the US where they had meetings to discuss current achievements and future possibilities of IIT's Research Collaborations with the University of Texas at Arlington, the University of Texas at Dallas and the University of Houston.
Read more

New IIT Education portal
A new website on Institute's initiatives and activities related to Education has been launched. It contains information about IIT's joint PhD programs, schools and scientific events IIT's researchers organize or participate to, and many more.
Visit iit.demokritos.gr/edu

Socrates next to Confucius
With a live digital library that will unite the philosophy of Confucius and Socrates and with four other original programs, Greece and China tighten their cultural relationships.
Read more

1) PhD theses completed, congratulations to:
- Bournaka Georgia, "Mathematical optimization techniques applied to wireless networks and resource management", Nov. 2013.
- Doliotis Pavlos: "Viewpoint Invariant Gesture Recognition and 3D Hand Pose Estimation using RGB-D", Nov. 2013.
- Galatas George: "Multimodal Human-Computer Interaction in Ambient Intelligence Environments", Nov. 2013.
- Papangelis Alexandros: "Adaptive Dialogue Systems", Nov. 2013.
Read more
2) Three students selected as PhD candidates in the context of the joint PhD programs between IIT and foreign Universities. 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

2013-14: 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 2013-14, in scientific areas like algorithms, artificial intelligence, machine learning, image analysis, and many more.

• Internships completed by: Panagopoulos Georgios, Papadopoulou Eleni, Proios Dimitris, Sapountzi Athanasia, Sarriyiannis Ioannis, Tragopoulou Spyridoula. Read more

Miscellaneous

• Greek Research Centers Evaluation 2014: in view of the forthcoming evaluation of the Greek Research Centers, the Periodic Report 2005-2012 and the Business Plan 2013-2017 for IIT were submitted to the General Secretariat for Research and Technology (GSRT), on December 2013.
• More than thirty-five (35) new jobs and seven (7) scholarships for doctoral studies were announced by IIT, between September and December 2013. The scholoarships are given in the context of IIT's joint PhD programs with foreign Universities. View all job openings at IIT

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