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