People

George is heading the SKEL lab of the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications at NCSR “Demokritos”. With more than 60 researchers and staff, SKEL is one of the largest Artificial Intelligence labs in Europe. George holds a PhD from the University of Manchester, UK, on machine learning. He has performed basic and applied research in AI for more than 25 years, has chaired international conferences and serves in the editorial board of related journals. He has also been leading large international research projects and has co-founded innovative spin-offs.

Eirini is a Research Fellow at NCSR Demokritos, leading the DICE team. She has previously led the Cyber Security Data Science team at Barclays in the UK. She holds a PhD in Data Mining from the University of Bristol and a Masters in Natural Language Processing from the University of Cambridge. She has worked as a postdosctoral researcher at the University of Bristol and at Toshiba Research.

Ion Androutsopoulos is Professor of ΑΙ in the Dept. of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB), head of AUEB's Natural Language Processing (NLP) Group, and Scientific Advisor at DICE. He holds a PhD in AI from the University of Edinburgh. His main expertise is in NLP, especially: question answering; natural language generation; text classification; information extraction and opinion mining; machine learning in natural language processing, especially deep learning. Personal pages: http://www2.aueb.gr/users/ion/.

Vangelis Karkaletsis is the Director of the Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications (IIΤ) at NCSR Demokritos and Member of the National Council for Research and Innovation (ESETEK). His research interests are in the areas of content analysis, big data management, knowledge representation, human-machine interaction. Head of the Software & Knowledge Engineering Lab at IIT, from 2004 to 2019. Coordinator, scientific and technical manager of many European and national projects and organiser of numerous international conferences, workshops and summer schools. He has been responsible for the Institute's educational activities for more than 10 years, and initiated the joint PhD scholarship program with several Universities abroad, whilst launching the new MSc in Data Science and MSc in Artificial Intelligence programs for NCSR Demokritos.

George Giannakopοulos, PhD is an Artificial Intelligence Research Fellow at NCSR "Demokritos". He has been working for 15 years in research, working on natural language processing, data mining and bioinformatics, with more than 700 citatios of his work. He has more than 20 years of professional IT experience, on biomedical informatics, data analysis and A.I. In 2012 he co-founded SciFY, a not-for-profit company which designs and implements tech transfer towards the industry and society. He is an EACL, and EurAI member and, since January 2019, a Member of the Board of EETN (the Hellenic Artificial Intelligence Society).

George Petasis is a research associate at the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications at NCSR Demokritos. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Athens on the topic of machine learning for natural language processing. His research interests lie in the areas of natural language processing, knowledge representation and machine learning, including information extraction, ontology learning, linguistic resources, grammatical inference, speech synthesis and natural language processing infrastructures. He is the author of the Ellogon natural language engineering platform. He is a member of the programme committees of several international conferences and has been involved in more than 15 European and national research projects. As a visiting professor at the University of Patras, he has taught both undergraduate and postgraduate courses. Co-founder of “Intellitech”, a Greek company specialising in natural language processing.

Makis Malakasiotis is a post-doctoral researcher at DICE, a teaching fellow at Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB) and a member of the Natural Language Processing Group of AUEB. He holds a Ph.D., an M.Sc. in Computer Science, and a B.Sc. in Informatics from AUEB. His research interests focuse on Natural Language Processing (NLP), and particularly deep learning for: text summarization, text quality estimation, information retrieval and information extraction including legal text analytics, paraphrasing and textual entailment, toxic language detection, and opinion mining, including sentiment analysis.

Ilias Zavitsanos has graduated from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Dpt. of Informatics and Telecommunications. He holds a Ph.D. on Ontology Learning and Evaluation from Texts, from the Dpt. of Information and Communication Systems Engineering at the University of the Aegean. He is interested in machine learning, topic modeling, information retrieval, and deep learning. He has worked as a research fellow at the NCSR Demokritos and for the University of the Aegean. He has also worked in the industry, as a software engineer and data scientist.

Dimitris Mavroeidis is a Natural Language Processing Research Engineer with extensive experience both in Research and the Industry. He has worked as an NLP specialist, researcher and software engineer for ILSP, CSRI, Xerox, Intrasoft and Omilia on Machine Translation, Classification, Knowledge Bases for Artificial Agents, Natural Language Understanding and Interactive Voice Response. He holds an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh and a BSc in Informatics from the Athens University of Economics and Business.

Manos Fergadiotis is a research engineer at DICE and a research assistant at Natural Language Processing Group of the Department of Informatics of Athens University of Economics and Business. He holds a BSc in Computer Science from the Department of Informatics of Athens University of Economics and Business and is currently pursuing a MSc in Data Science at the same university. His research interests lie primarily in the areas of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning especially Deep Learning methods for Natural Language Processing including legal text analytics, text classification, information extraction and data mining. He's also a research assistant at Natural Language Processing Group of the Department of Informatics of Athens University of Economics and Business.

Ilias Chalkidis is currently doing a PhD with title “Deep Neural Networks for Information Mining from legal texts”, at the Department of Informatics of Athens University of Business and Economics. In 2016, he finished his MSc degree in Computer Science specializing in Advanced Information Systems, while working as a research associate on legal knowledge representation (http://legislation.di.uoa.gr) at the department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the National Kapodistrian University of Athens. He has expertise in legal text analytics (AI & Law), where he has investigated a wide repertoire of applications related to text classification, entity extraction and information retrieval.

Konstantinos Bougiatiotis is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Computer Science focusing on machine learning over graphs at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Dpt. of Informatics and Telecommunications. He has been working as a Research Assistant with the Software & Knowledge Engineering Lab (SKEL) group of the Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications (IIT) since 2015. His current research is centered around relational machine learning for knowledge graphs, representation learning and graph neural networks. He is also interested in classical ML, NLP, multi-modal processing and recommendation systems.

Lefteris Loukas received his Diploma degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Thessaly, Greece, in 2019. In his Master's thesis, he combined deep learning and computer vision techniques for self-driving cars. During his last years of studies, he has been working as a Software Engineer, where he developed conversational AI for commercial chatbots. He also has research experience in energy disaggregation using machine learning, and he is highly interested in intelligent systems and natural language processing, as well as their intersection with human-computer interaction.

Nikos Manginas is a recent graduate from University College London(UCL) in the United Kingdom. His undergraduate degree is in Electrical and Electronic Engineering and his integrated Masters has focused on Computer Science. His research projects throughout his studies were focused on Machine Learning and include Deep Learning for audio applications, Reinforcement Learning in Networks and some smaller projects. His research interests include the formalization and the abstraction of the learning process, learning through interactions (reinforcement learning) and alternatives to backprop based architectures.

Sofoklis Karavellas received his Diploma degree from the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). He is currently pursuing a MSc in Data Science from a collaboration program between NCSR "Demokritos" and the University of the Peloponnese. He is working as a system administrator for the Software & Knowledge Engineering Lab (SKEL) of NCSR "Demokritos".

Elena Galifianaki is an expert in marketing, public relations, event organisation and online community management, acquired through her education and professional career. Her education started in Greece and was completed in the UK with a BA (Hons) in Advertising & Marketing and two postgraduate degrees; one in Business Studies (with Distinction) and one in Cultural Heritage Tourism. Her international expertise has been built up whilst working in the UK, France, Belgium and Greece in various Communications roles. She currently acts as a Communications Officer for European projects at SKEL Lab, NCSR “Demokritos”. In parallel, she offers consulting services to the European Commission relating to online communities and social media management.

Xenia Ziouvelou holds a PhD in Internet Economics & Strategy (scholarship) from Lancaster University (UK). Xenia is working as the Innovation Officer and as a research scientist at the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications at NCSR “Demokritos”. 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). Xenia has a long working experience in various roles in academia and industry in Greece and across Europe. Her principal research interests bridge business and computer science, focusing on innovation in technology-advanced ecosystems (AI, IoT).

Niki is a Project Management Coordinator with experience in management of funded research projects in public and private sector. She has worked in Academic environment for many years in several Institutes of Education; (AUEB, USPS, UOA) in the field of Research, handling projects funded by European Commission (H2020, Erasmus, Interreg, FP7, Maria Sklodowska-Curie); projects funded by National Organizations (NSRF, MIA-RTDI) or private funds. Recently she organised Project Management Department in an innovative Medical Solutions Startup Company in order to manage current research projects and to facilitate the submission of new proposals. She holds an MSc in Human Resources Management from Athens University of Economics and Business and a BSc in Marketing and Communication from the same Institute.