Introduction to the Research Work at the Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications of NCSR “Demokritos”

When: Wednesday, March 25, 2015
Where: PGH 232
Time: 11:00 AM

Speaker: Dr. Vangelis Karkaletsis, National Centre for Scientific Research “Demokritos”

Host: Prof. Ioannis Kakadiaris

An overview of 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, focusing on our recent work for the management of heterogeneous and large-scale data. Heterogeneity and transparent distribution are the focus of the SemaGrow project (http://semagrow.eu/), approached as federated querying that is transparently optimized and where semantic transformations are dynamically applied. The outcome is a stack of technologies that simplify both the inclusion of heterogeneous data sources to a federated end-point and the development of client applications for this end-point. The SemaGrow Stack will be integrated in the Big Data Aggregator that is developed in the recently started Big Data Europe project (http://www.big-data-europe.eu/).

Bio:

Dr. 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. He has extensive experience in the coordination and technical management of European and national projects. He is currently Technical/scientific 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, the H2020 project Your Data Stories on the analysis of open governmental data and their linking to social web. He is also site manager for the H2020 Big Data Europe project for the development of a Big Data Integrator platform, and coordinator of the H2020 Radio project on the use of robots in assisted living environments.

He served for several years in the Board of the Hellenic Artificial Intelligence Society. He has organised 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 organiser of the International Research-centered Summer Schools (IRSS-2013, 2014). He teaches for many years at post-graduate courses on language and knowledge technologies. He is co-founder of the spin-off company ‘i-sieve Technologies’ that exploited SKEL research work on on-line content analysis. He is currently involved in the founding of the new spin-off company Newsum that exploits SKEL technology on multilingual and multi-document summarization.