National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (UOA)

The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens was founded in 1837 and it is the oldest university in Greece. The Department of Informatics and Telecommunications (http://www.di.uoa.gr) has been active since 1986 and for the years 2009-2011, the department has been ranked among the top-100 departments in Computer Science internationally by the Academic Ranking of World Universities founded and compiled by the Shanghai Jiaotong University. The department currently has 42 faculty members covering all areas of Informatics and Telecommunications. The department has a long standing tradition in research and teaching, and it is equipped with a number of contemporary research and teaching laboratories. Many of the department faculty members are world leaders in their individual research areas, and have been awarded distinguished professional society fellowships (ACM, IEEE among them), prizes and awards. The team that will participate in the project is part the MADGIK-Lab that has a long and pertinent experience in participating and leading European funded projects. The faculty, research staff and students are partners in a large number of projects of National and International scale. Much of the research is done in the context of and inspired by problems in several application areas, such as Medical Informatics, Cultural Heritage, Museum Studies, Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Marine Science, Environment, History, and others. More particularly, the MADGIKLab has a long and distinguished record in several research areas of Computer Science such as such as Database and Information Systems, Distributed and Peer-to-Peer Systems, Cloud Computing, Sensor-based and Stream Data Management, Query Optimization, Information Search, Personalization and Social Networks, Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Constraint Satisfaction Problems, Semantic Web and Linked Data, Semantic Sensor Web, Digital Libraries, and Human-Computer Interaction.

The team that participates the project has a long history with the technology and the domain of natural sciences and as such it is one of the core ingredients of the project for bringing the gCube-powered VRE technology to new domains of applicability. The scientific and technological expertise of the team participating the project will facilitate newcomers to adapt to the distributed nature of VRE resources and exploit the power of the eInfrastructure placed at their reach. Furthermore the team will maintain existing facilities of the gCube system to follow the new requirements and technological advances and seek scientific publications and awareness raising for the project. Finally the expertise of the organization in the educational area will be put in practice in several cases.

Key members

Prof. Yannis Ioannidis is currently a Professor at the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the University of Athens. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1986 and was appointed professor in 1999. His research interests include database and information systems, digital libraries, scientific systems, and human-computer interaction, topics on which he has published over sixty articles in leading journals and conferences and holds two patents. Prof. Ioannidis was elected as the ACM SIGMOD chair for a 4 year term, is an ACM and IEEE Fellow, and was the recipient of the Presidential Young Investigator (PYI) award in 1991. He is currently an Associate Editor of five journals (IS, VLDB Journal, J. of Digital Libraries, J. of Int. Information Systems, and the electronic ACM Digital Symposium Collection) and has been a member of the program committees of over sixty conferences, four times as (co-)chair (VLDB, ICDE, EDBT, HDMS, SSDBM, and VDB). He has served on the review or scientific boards of the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories in Berkeley, and the (now defunct) CESDIS Center for Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences. Finally, between 2002 and 2004 he served as the Information Technology advisor to the Minister of Health of Greece. He has been a principal investigator in over twenty five research projects.

Georgios Kakaletris is a graduate of the Department of Physics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, holds a M.Sc. in Informatics and is a PhD candidate in the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, of the same institution. He is also a Microsoft Certified Professional (1999). He has worked for major Greek companies (Profile SA., Intelltech SA.,/Quest SA., Decision SA), initially as an engineer and software designer (S/W Engineer-Architect), then as Project Manager (IT Project Manager) and during the last years as Director of the Research & Development Department. He has been acting as an IT consultant for a number of private and public bodies such as the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, the Greek Parliament etc. He is founding member of CITE and member its Board of Directors and since 2012 he is the Chief Technology Officer of the company. His experience covers the following sectors: Design, development and implementation of integrated information systems for both the public and private sectors, Management of information technology projects, Real-time data transmission services, Large scale financial applications, Data management systems, Distributed Systems etc. He has participated several projects on behalf of National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and the Athena Research and Innovation Center: TONIC, mGuide, DILIGENT, EcoSys, D4Science, D4Science II, EarthServer, InterACT and iMarine.