AISummerSchool

Ion Androutsopoulos

Professor, Athens University of Economics and Business

Ion Androutsopoulos is Professor of Artificial Intelligence and head of the Natural Language Processing Group in the Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business. His current research interests include: question answering, esp. for biomedical document collections; natural language generation, recently from medical images; text classification, incl. filtering abusive content; information extraction and opinion mining, incl. legal text analytics and sentiment analysis; NLP tools for Greek; machine learning in NLP, esp. deep learning; NLP in digital curation.

Alexandros Artikis

Associate Professor, University of Piraeus

Alexandros Artikis is an Associate Professor at the University of Piraeus, and a Research Associate at the National Centre for Scientific Research (NCSR) "Demokritos", leading the Complex Event Recognition group. His research interests lie in the fields of artificial intelligence and distributed systems. Most of his work has been on complex event recognition and (norm-governed) multi-agent systems.

Yannis Assael

Researcher, Google Deepmind

Dr. Yannis Assael is a Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind specialising in Artificial Intelligence. He is featured in “MIT's Innovators Under 35” and “Forbes' 30 Under 30” lists of distinguished scientists in Europe, and serves as a Special Advisor for Artificial Intelligence to the Hellenic Ministry of Digital Governance. In 2013, he graduated from the Department of Applied Informatics of University of Macedonia. With full scholarships, he completed an MSc in Computer Science at the University of Oxford, finishing first in his year, followed by an MRes in Machine Learning at Imperial College London. In 2016, he returned to Oxford to pursue a DPhil degree, and after a series of research breakthroughs and entrepreneurial ventures, he started as a researcher at Google DeepMind. His contributions span audio-visual speech recognition, multi-agent communication, as well as AI for Culture and the study of damaged ancient texts. His research has been featured on the cover of the scientific journal Nature, and focuses on expanding and contributing to the greater good.

Eleni Chatzi

Professor, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich

Eleni Chatzi is currently an Associate Professor, and the Chair of Structural Mechanics, at the Institute of Structural Engineering, of the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering (DBAUG), ETH Zürich. She has obtained her diploma (2004) and MSc (2006) in Civil Engineering, with honors, from the Department of Civil Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). In June 2010 she obtained her PhD Degree with distinction from the Department of Civil Engineering & Engineering Mechanics at Columbia University. In 2010 she was hired as the youngest Assistant Professor in ETH, and was promoted to an Associate Professor in 2017.

Prof. Chatzi’s research couples novel simulation tools with state-of the-art monitoring methodologies for intelligent and data-driven assessment and diagnostics of engineered systems, with the goal of providing actionable tools able to guide operators and engineers in the management of their assets. A key aspect of her research lies in extraction of quantifiable metrics that are indicative of structural performance across the component, system and network levels. Her expertise lies in the area of Structural Health Monitoring, with a strong focus on problems lying beyond the commonly adopted assumption of linear time invariant systems. Her research spans a broad range of topics, including applications on emerging sensor technologies and structural control, methods for curbing uncertainties in structural diagnostics and life-cycle assessment, as well as advanced schemes for nonlinear/nonstationary dynamics simulations.

Prof. Chatzi serves as editor for numerous peer-reviewed international journals with particular focus on system identification methods and topics relating to SHM. Since 2016, she is coordinating the joint ETH Zürich & University of Zurich PhD Programme in Computational Science. She is currently leading the ERC Starting Grant WINDMIL on the topic of "Smart Monitoring, Inspection and Life-Cycle Assessment of Wind Turbines", awarded by the European Research Council. Her work in the domain of self-aware infrastructure was recognized with the 2020 Walter L. Huber Research prize, awarded by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). She is further a recipient of the 2020 EASD Junior Research Prize in the area of Computational Structural Dynamics, awarded by the European Association of Structural Dynamics (EASD).

Constantine Caramanis

Professor, University of Texas at Austin

Dr. Constantine Caramanis is a Professor and holds the Chandra Family Endowed Distinguished Professorship in Electrical and Computer Engineering #1 in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin.

Dr. Caramanis joined the UT Electrical and Computer Engineering department in the Fall of 2006. He received his A.B. in Mathematics from Harvard University, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.

His research interests center on decision-making in large-scale complex systems, with a focus on learning and computation. Specifically, he is interested in robust and adaptable optimization, high dimensional statistics and machine learning, and applications to large-scale networks, including social networks, wireless networks, transportation networks, and energy networks. He also works on applications of machine learning and optimization to computer-aided design.

Vangelis Karkaletsis

Director, Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications- NCSR Demokritos

Vangelis Karkaletsis is Director of the Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications (IIΤ) at NCSR Demokritos, and Member of the National Commission for Bioethics & Technoethics. His research interests are in the areas of content analysis, big data management, knowledge representation, human-machine interaction. Coordinator, scientific and technical manager of many European and national projects and organiser of numerous international conferences, workshops and summer schools. Having been responsible for the Institute's educational activities for more than 10 years, he initiated the joint PhD scholarship programme with several Universities abroad, and launched the MSc in Data Science and MSc in Artificial Intelligence programmes for NCSR Demokritos.

Nikos Komodakis

Assistant Professor, University of Crete

Nikos Komodakis holds the position of Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Department, University of Crete. He is also affiliated with the Institute of Applied & Computational Mathematics, FORTH, and is a researcher at the Archimedes Center for Research in Artificial Intelligence. Previously, he served as an Associate Professor at Ecole des Ponts ParisTech and held roles as a research scientist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a visiting Professor at Ecole Normale Superieure de Cachan. His research focuses on Computer Vision/Image Analysis, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence. Furthermore, he contributes as an Editorial Board Member/Associate Editor for journals like Computer Vision and Image Understanding, International Journal of Computer Vision, and Computational Intelligence Journal.

Elisa Konofagou

Professor, Columbia University

Elisa E. Konofagou designs and develops ultrasound-based technologies for automated estimation of tissue mechanics as well as drug delivery and therapeutics. Her group has worked on the design of algorithms that can estimate minute deformation as a result of physiological function, such as in the heart and vessels, and displacements induced by the ultrasound wave itself, such as in tumors and nerves, while she maintains several collaborations with physicians in order to translate these technologies to the clinical setting. She has also developed novel techniques in order to facilitate noninvasive brain drug delivery as well as modulation of both the central and peripheral nervous systems.

Manolis Koubarakis

Professor, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

Manolis Koubarakis is a Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Dept. of Informatics and Telecommunications, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

In 2015, he was elected Fellow of the European Association of Artificial Intelligence (EurAI).

He previously held positions at the Dept. of Electronic and Computer Engineering , Technical University of Crete (Assistant and Associate Professor), the Dept. of Informatics, University of Athens (Visiting Researcher), the Dept. of Computation, UMIST(now University of Manchester) (Lecturer) and the Dept. of Computing, Imperial College, London (Research Associate).

He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science, from the National Technical University of Athens, an M.Sc. in Computer Science, from the University of Toronto, and a diploma (B.Sc.) in Mathematics, from the University of Crete.

Petros Koumoutsakos

Professor, Harvard University

Petros Koumoutsakos is Herbert S. Winokur, Jr. Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Faculty Director of the Institute for Applied Computational Science (IACS) and Area Chair of Applied Mathematics at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). He studied Naval Architecture (Diploma-NTU of Athens, M.Eng.-U. of Michigan), Aeronautics and Applied Mathematics (PhD-Caltech). He has conducted post-doctoral studies at the Center for Parallel Computing at Caltech and at the Center for Turbulent Research at Stanford University and NASA Ames. He has served as the Chair of Computational Science at ETHZ Zurich (1997-2020) and has held visiting fellow positions at Caltech, the University of Tokyo, MIT, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University and he is Distinguished Affiliated Professor at TU Munich.

Petros is elected Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the American Physical Society (APS), the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and the Collegium Helveticum. He is recipient of the Advanced Investigator Award by the European Research Council and the ACM Gordon Bell prize in Supercomputing. He is elected International Member to the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

His research interests are on the fundamentals and applications of computing and artificial intelligence to understand, predict and optimize fluid flows in engineering, nanotechnology, and medicine.

Tasos Kyrillidis

Assistant Professor, RICE Univercity

Anastasios (Tasos) Kyrillidis is a Noah Harding Assistant Professor at the Computer Science department at Rice University. Prior to that, he was a Goldstine PostDoctoral Fellow at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center (NY), and a Simons Foundation PostDoc member at the University of Texas at Austin. He finished his PhD at the CS Department of EPFL (Switzerland).

He is a recipient of a NSF CAREER award, an Amazon Research Award (ARA), a Microsoft Research Award, and is closely collaborating with Intel.

His research interests include (but not limited to):

• Optimization for machine learning
• Convex and non-convex algorithms and analysis
• Efficient large-scale optimization, including budgeted optimization, and algorithmic design that moves away from regular optimizers.
• Any problem that includes a math-driven criterion, and requires an efficient method for its solution.

Giannis Nikolentzos

Assistant Professor, University of Peloponnese

Giannis Nikolentzos is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the University of Peloponnese. His research interests lie mostly in the field of graph representation learning and learning on structured data. Before joining the University of Peloponnese, he was was a postdoctoral researcher at Ecole Polytechnique. He obtained his PhD in computer science from the Athens University of Economics and Business, where he was advised by Professor Michalis Vazirgiannis. Before that, he obtained an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Southampton and a Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Patras.

Georgios Paliouras

Researcher, National Centre for Scientific Research (NCSR) "Demokritos

George Paliouras is the head of The AI Lab SKEL of IIT, NCSR Demokritos in Athens, Greece. He is the voluntary chairman of the board of the Duchenne Data Foundation, a member of the HMA/EMA Joint Big Data Steering Group, and board member & Machine Learning advisor of Langaware Inc. He is also Area Chair of ECAI 2024.

His research interests include machine learning, knowledge discovery, artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, personalization, user modelling, information filtering, information extraction, event recognition, ontology learning, grammar learning and web mining.

Christos Papadimitriou

Professor, Columbia University

Christos Papadimitriou works on the theory of algorithms and complexity, aiming to expand the field's methodology and reach. His research often explores areas beyond computer science through what he calls the algorithmic lens: biology and the theory of evolution, economics and game theory (where he helped found the field of algorithmic game theory), artificial intelligence and robotics, networks and the Internet and, since 2013, the study of the brain and language. In this endeavor, Papadimitriou and his co-authors strive to bridge the gap between neurons and cognition -- between the brain and the mind -- by articulating formal models of the neural brain in which emergent behaviors can be proved formally, as well as brain-like artifacts capable of emulating complex cognitive phenomena, most recently natural language acquisition.

Dimitris Papailiopoulos

Associate Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Dimitris Papailiopoulos is the Jay & Cynthia Ihlenfeld Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (and CS by courtesy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a faculty fellow at the Grainger Institute, and a faculty affiliate with the Optimization group at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery.

His research lies in the intersection of machine learning, coding theory, and optimization. He is particularly interested in the theory and practice of large-scale machine learning systems and the challenges that arise once we aim to build solutions that come with robustness and scalability guarantees.  He is particuarly interested in these topics in the context of large language models and transformer architectures.

In 2018, he co-founded the conference on Machine Learning & Systems (MLSys), a new conference that targets research at the intersection of systems and machine learning. In 2018 and 2020, I was the program co-chair for MLSys. In 2019, he also co-chaired the 3rd Midwest Machine Learning Symposium (MMLS).

George Pappas

Professor, University of Pennsylvania

George J. Pappas is the UPS Foundation Professor at the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He also holds a secondary appointment in the Departments of Computer and Information Sciences, and Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics. Previously, he served as the Deputy Dean for Research in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. Pappas's research interest focus on control systems, robotics and autonomous systems, formal methods, machine learning for safe and secure cyber-physical systems. He has received numerous awards including the NSF PECASE, the Antonio Ruberti Young Researcher Prize, the George S. Axelby Award, the O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award, and the George H. Heilmeier Faculty Excellence Award. Pappas has mentored more than fifty students and postdocs, most of the faculty in leading universities around the world. Recognized for his outstanding contributions, Pappas is a Fellow of IEEE, IFAC, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2024.

Thanos Voulodimos

Professor, National Technical University of Athens

Athanasios (Thanos) Voulodimos received his Dipl.-Ing., MSc and PhD degrees from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) with the highest honor. Since December 2021 he is an Assistant Professor at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Division of Computer Science) of the National Technical University of Athens. From 2018 to 2021 he was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Informatics and Computer Engineering of the University of West Attica, where he served as Director of the Division of Software and Information Systems and as Pedagogical Director of the joint MSc program in “Artificial Intelligence and Visual Computing” co-organized with the University of Limoges (France). He has received several awards for his academic performance and scientific achievements by the Greek State Scholarships Foundation (IKY), the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), the Hellenic Mathematical Society (HMS) and the European Neural Network Society (ENNS). His research interests lie in the areas of machine learning, artificial intelligence, image and signal processing, multimedia, and multimodal data fusion, management and analysis. He has participated in more than 15 European and national research & development projects, as researcher, senior researcher, and/or technical manager. Dr. Voulodimos has co-authored more than 130 papers in refereed international journals, conference proceedings and books. His work has received more than 4000 citations (as reported in Google Scholar). He has served as Organizing and Program Committee member in several international conferences and workshops, and has guest edited collective book volumes and special issues in international journals. He is a member of IEEE and ACM.

George Vouros

Head of TTS R&D, University of Piraeus

Prof. George VOUROS (B.Sc, Ph.D) holds a BSc in Mathematics (1986), and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence (1992) all from the University of Athens, Greece. Currently he is a Professor in the Department of Digital Systems in the University of Piraeus and head of the AI-Lab in this Department. He has done research in the areas of Expert Systems, Knowledge Management, Collaborative Systems, Ontologies, and Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. He served/serves as program chair, chair and member of organizing committees of national and international conferences (AAMAS, AAAI, IJCAI, ECAI, WI/IAT, AT, EUMAS, ICMLA, ESWC, CSCL, AIAI) and as member of steering committees/boards of international conferences/workshops (EURAMAS, SETN, AT, COIN, OAEI). He has given keynote speeches in conferences and workshops (WoMo, ICTAI, CLIMA, IF&GIS) and he has organized several workshops (MATES@EDBT, Data-Driven ATM@WAC, Data-Enhanced Trajectory Based Operations@ICRAT; the most recent ones). He served/serves as guest editor in special issues in well-reputed journals (e.g. IJCIS, AIR, GEOINFORMATICA, AICom, ISF). He is/was senior researcher in numerous EU-funded and National research projects (GSRT/AMINESS, FP7/Grid4All, FP7/SEMAGROW, COST/Agreement Technologies the most recent ones and has supervised 13 PhD students. He currently supervises 4 PhD students. He recently coordinated the successful DART project (SESAR project) and coordinates the datACRON Big Data project  (H2020 ICT-16).

George Vouros has served 3 times as chair of the Hellenic A.I. Society board.

He is the head of the Ai LAb @ Dept. Digital Systems, University of Piraeus  and director of the MSc on AI  in collaboration with Inst. of Informatics and Telecom. of NCSR “Demokritos”.

Dimitrios Vytiniotis

Researcher, Google Deepmind

Dimitrios Vytiniotis is a research scientist for DeepMind in London, UK. Before joining DeepMind, he was a researcher in the Programming Principles and Tools Group at Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK.

His work revolves around programming languages design and implementation, as well as the use of techniques from programming languages in other domains.He has worked on: design and implementation of programming languages, domain-specific languages, type systems and constraint solving (notably in the context of Haskell and the Glasgow Haskell Compiler), functional programming, static analyses and formal verification, use of symbolic techniques in problems in systems and machine learning, memory management and garbage collection; and compilation for high-performance signal processing applications and for AI accelerators.

In DeepMind he is thinking about:

• Programming models, transformations, and compilation techniques targetting machine learning applications.
• The integration of machine learning techniques in compilers and symbolic reasoning.

Xenia Ziouvelou

Researcher, National Centre for Scientific Research (NCSR) "Demokritos

Dr. Xenia Ziouvelou holds a PhD in Internet Economics & Strategy (scholarship awarded) from the Department of Economics of Lancaster University (UK). Xenia is currently working as the Innovation Officer and a research scientist at the Software and Knoweldge Engineering Lab of the Institute of the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications (IIT) of NCSR “Demokritos” (NCSRD). She is also a visiting academic at the Business School of the University of Southampton (UK) and acts as an external innovation expert for the European Commission. Xenia is a member of the scientific committee of AI4People, Europe’s first Global forum on the social impacts of artificial intelligence, launched by Atomium–European Institute for Science, Media and Democracy (EISMD). She has a long working experience as a senior research scientist, lecturer/Assistant Professor, technology transfer and innovation officer in research and education institutions in UK and in Greece. Xenia has worked as a research scientist and innovation manager in numerous EU-funded research and industrial projects covering diverse thematic areas in the context of innovation and technology-mediated evolution across various industrial sectors. Her principal research interests are in innovation and technological transformation and the way that they revolutionise business, law and policy. Xenia is a working group member of the Creative Commons Greece and holds two open innovation patents (USPO) as the principal investigator.