Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH)

Information Technology Institute (ITI)

CERTH, Greece,     www.certh.gr
Information Technology Institute,      www.iti.gr
Multimedia Knowledge and Social Media Analytics Laboratory,      www.mklab.iti.gr

The Centre for Research and Technology-Hellas (CERTH), founded in 2000, is the only research center in Northern Greece and one of the largest in the country. CERTH has important scientific and technological achievements in many areas including: Energy, Environment, Industry, Mechatronics,

Information & Communication, Transportation & Sustainable Mobility, Health, Agro-biotechnology, Smart farming, Safety & The Centre for Research and Technology-Hellas (CERTH), founded in 2000, is the only research center in Northern Greece and one of the largest in the country. CERTH has important scientific and technological achievements in many areas including: Energy, Environment, Industry, Mechatronics, Information & Communication, Transportation & Sustainable Mobility, Health, Agro-biotechnology, Smart farming, Safety & Security, as well as several cross-disciplinary scientific areas. Today CERTH includes the following five institutes: (a) Chemical Process & Energy Resources Institute (CPERI), (b) Information Technologies Institute (ITI), (c) Hellenic Institute of Transport (HIT), (d) Institute of Applied Biosciences (INAB), (e) Institute for Research and Technology Thessaly (IRETETH). Out of those, CERTH participates in this proposal through Information Technologies Institute (ITI).

CERTH is essentially a self-supported Research Centre generating an average annual turnover of ~€ 22 Millioncoming from: (a) >30% bilateral industrial research contracts, (b) >60% competitive research projects, (c) <10% as government institutional funding. More than 600 people work at CERTH with the majority being scientists. CERTH has received numerous awards and distinctions such as the European Descartes Prize, the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant, Microsoft International Contest Prize, the Trading Agents Competition Award and many more and is listed among the Top-20 of the EU’s Research Centers with the highest participationin FP7 competitive research grants. CERTH has participated successfully in more than 1.000 competitive researchprojects (with a total budget exceeding 423 M€ and involving more than 1.100 international partner organizations)financed by the European Union (EU), leading industries from USA, Japan and Europe and the Greek Government via the General Secretariat of Research and Technology (GSRT).

The Information Technologies Institute (ITI) of CERTH was founded in 1998 as a non-profit organization under the auspices of the GSRT, with its head office located in Thessaloniki, Greece. Since 2000 it has been a foundingmember of the GSRT supervised CERTH. ITIʼs related areas of research are Social Media Analysis, Indexing andRetrieval, Semantic Multimedia Analysis, Affective Computing, Image and Signal Processing, Computer and Cognitive Vision, Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, Human Computer Interaction, Virtual and Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence.

The participating team, namely the Multimedia Knowledge and Social Data Analytics laboratory (MKLab), part of the Information Technologies Institute (one of the five CERTH institutes), has significant experience and

scientific expertise on the technical aspects of MindSpaces, namely on computer vision, image processing and machine learning area, such as human activity localization and recognition, interactive video retrieval as analytically described in the main achievements section. Furthermore, MKlab has deep knowledge in recognizing the objects and scenes that exist in images, represent their features and fuse them in several sophisticated ways. MKlab expertise has been cultivated and blossomed through its leading and cooperative role in several EU multimedia related projects, such as H2020 in VID and FP7 iTREASURES, and FP7 MULTISENSOR. MKlab also participates in many multimedia tasks of TRECVID such as INS (INStance search), SED (Surveillance Event Detection) and AVS (Ad-hoc Video Search) that give the lab the opportunity to learn and improve throughout years, as well as adopting and get inspired from state-of-the-art related technologies.

In the recent years, the team has coordinated and participated in more than 20 European and National research projects in the areas of multimedia processing, information extraction and social media monitoring and analysis. MKLab currently coordinates the H2020 ICT MAMEM, the H2020 SEC BeAWARE and the H2020 ICT ENVISAGE and has leading roles in H2020 ICT KRISTINA, H2020 SEC TENSOR. Furthermore, MKLab has coordinated the FP7 ICT STREP MULTISENSOR, the FP7 ICT IP SocialSensor and the FP7 ICT IP Dem@Care. In addition, it had leading roles in FP7 SEC CP-FP HOMER, FP7 ICT Live+Gov, FP7 ICT REVEAL, FP7 ICT STREP WikiRate, FP7 ICT IP LinkedTV, FP7 ICT ForgetIT, FP7 ICT PERICLES and FCT ICT USEMP.


People

Dr. Ioannis (Yiannis) Kompatsiaris

Senior Researcher (Researcher A), CERTH

Dr. Stefanos Vrochidis

Senior Researcher, CERTH ITI

Dr. Sotiris Diplaris

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, CERTH ITI

Dr. Spiros Nikolopoulos

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, CERTH ITI

Dr. Konstantinos Avgerinakis

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, CERTH ITI

Nefeli Georgakopoulou

Architect, DIgital artist