Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications of NCSR “Demokritos”: Opportunities for Research and Educational Cooperation with UHouston – CS

When: Monday, November 18, 2013
Where: PGH 232
Time: 10:30 AM

Speaker: Prof. Constaintine D. Spyropoulos and Prof. Vangelis Karkaletisis, National Center for Scientific Research “Demokritos”

Host: Prof. Ioannis Kakadiaris

An overview for the research work performed at the National Center for Scientific Research "Demokritos" (NCSR), the largest public research center in Greece, will be given first, followed by an introduction to the research activities of the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications, in the areas of wireless networks, smart antennas, management and Interoperability of heterogeneous telecommunication networks, web technologies, intelligent systems. We'll then present in more detail the research work in areas of potential interest for CS, such as language technology, event recognition, human machine interaction, computer vision, big data analysis. The research infrastructure, the main approaches examined, and the major outcomes in the context of research and development projects will be presented, aiming at initiating subsequent discussions for joint research work in these areas, in the context of the existing cooperation agreement between the two institutions. We will also present the educational activities of the Institute aiming to enhance the existing joint PhD program as well as to discuss additional opportunities for cooperation, such as exchange of researchers or students, joint organization of summer schools, joint postgraduate programs.

Bios:
Constantine D. Spyropoulos graduated from the University of Ioannina in 1974 and awarded a MSc. and Ph.D. degree in 1975 and 1979, respectively, from the Loughborough University of Technology in England. After finishing his military service he worked as S/W Engineering Consultant at the R&D departments of the Greek Air and Army Forces. He joined NCSR "Demokritos" in 1984 and in 1989 founded the Software and Knowledge Engineering Laboratory (SKEL) and he was heading it till 2003. He had participated for many years as member of the scientific board and Deputy Director of the Institute. From June 2004 till July 2013 he was the Director of the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications. From January 2009 till April 2011 he was appointed as Vice President of the Board of Directors of NCSR "Demokritos" and from May 2010 till February 2011 he served as the acting Director of NCSR ³Demokritos². At the beginning of his carrier at NCSR "Demokritos" he was involved in research and development for knowledge representation, temporal reasoning, planning and scheduling, expert systems and S/W I18n and L10n, while later he gave emphasis to the problem of information overloading using NLP for content based categorization, filtering and information extraction from plain texts, or web pages, ontologies, as well as user modeling and exploitation of machine learning methods. He has published plethora of papers in scientific journals, conferences, workshops and schools, has an international reputation and has being awarded the title of ECCAI Fellow. He coordinated as PI many international and national projects with a total budget that exceeds the 10 million Euro and has participated in many other R&D projects. Nowadays he is heading the Intelligent Software Solutions Laboratory. Since August 2004 Dr. Spyropoulos is one of the founders and member of the board of the spin-off company called Œi-sieve Technologies¹ that is exploiting the Œon-line content analysis technology¹ developed at the SKEL laboratory.

Vangelis Karkaletsis holds the position of Research Director at NCSR "Demokritos", is the head of the Software and Knowledge Engineering Laboratory (SKEL) of the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications, and responsible for the Institute's educational activities. His research interests are in the areas of Language and Knowledge Engineering, as applied to content analysis, natural language interfaces, ontology engineering, and personalization. He has a diploma on Computer Engineering from the University of Patras in Greece. He did his MSc thesis at the University of London (Queen Mary & Westfield College), on the development of natural language interfaces to databases. In his PhD thesis, at the University of Athens, he worked on knowledge acquisition and multilingual natural language generation. During his post-doc at NCSR "Demokritos", he worked on adaptive and multilingual information extraction. He was coordinator of the DG-SANCO project MedIEQ on the analysis of health-related web content, technical manager of the SIAP project QUATRO Plus on web content labeling, and coordinator of the Marie Curie project AVISPIRE on audio-visual processing. He is currently Technical manager of the FP7-ICT project NOMAD on web content analysis for e-government applications, the FP7-ICT project Semagrow on the efficient discovery of web resources, the FP7-ICT project C2Learn on computational tools fostering human creativity, and he runs for NSCR the data fusion and event recognition work of the FP7-ICT project USEFIL. He served for several years in the Board of the Hellenic Artificial Intelligence Society. He has organized or has been committee member of many workshops and conferences, was the Local Chair of the 12th Conf. of the European Chapter of the ACL (EACL-09), co-chair of the 6th Hellenic AI Conference (SETN-10), and organized the International Research centered Summer School (IRSS-2013).