Athena Research and Innovation Center

The Athena Research and Innovation Center in Information, Communication and Knowledge Technologies was founded in 2003 comprising of three previously existing and two new institutes. It operates under the auspices of the Ministry of Education Research and Religious Affairs (General Secretariat for Research and Technology). It is based in Athens, with its Institutes located in Athens, Patras and Xanthi.

The Athena Research and Innovation Center aims include the following:

  • Promotion of innovative information, communication and knowledge technologies in the industrial and services sectors
  • Development of scientific and technological research in the sectors of information technology, knowledge, communication and automating production processes and the implementation and exploitation of results aiming at the production of laboratory prototypes, products and services
  • Support of development activities in the above sectors and in their applications
  • Life-long learning and training in the respective sectors
  • Management of funding programmes aiming at supporting businesses that act in its sector; promotion of state research and technology policies

Athena RIC is comprised of the following Institutes:

    Institute for Language and Speech Processing – ILSP
    Industrial Systems Institute – ISI
    Institute for the Management of Information Systems – IMIS

More information is available at: https://www.athena-innovation.gr/

Research Team

Xaris Papageorgiou

Principal Researcher at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing of the R.C. “Athena”

Xaris Papageorgiou is a Principal Researcher at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) of the R.C. “Athena”. Haris is responsible for building advanced content analytics for scalable data systems and big data infrastructures. He has held Chief Scientist positions in several european and national projects in the area of multilingual, multimodal, multimedia processing. Haris holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from National Tech University of Athens(NTUA) and a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from NTUA. He has published more than 100 scientific papers in international books, journals and conference proceedings. He teaches "Big Data Content Analytics" in the AUEB MSc Business Analytics and Natural Language Processing in the NKUA MSc "Technoglossia". His research interests focus on language and speech technology, knowledge discovery and representation, machine learning, web mining and information retrieval with a current focus on social and political sciences. He has co-organised several workshops in the past, currently co-organizing SemEval Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis challenges. He loves applying Data Science for Social Good.

    Maria Pontiki

    Computational linguist/scientific associate at ILSP/Athena RIC

    Maria Pontiki is a computational linguist/scientific associate at ILSP/Athena RIC and a PhD candidate at the University of Crete. She holds a MSc in Language Technology, a MSc in Comparative, Historical and Balkan Linguistics and a bachelor’s degree in Greek Philology. Her research interests include designing and developing linguistic resources and applications for information extraction from text (web, blogs, social media etc.) for the Greek and the English language, sentiment analysis (opinion mining, mood analysis etc.) and knowledge modeling & representation. She has also co-organized sentiment analysis projects/tasks in the framework of international events and challenges (International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2014, SemEval-2015, SemEval-2016), International Research-Centered Summer School in Cognitive Systems and Interactive Robotics, Social Media, Digital Preservation (IRSS13)).

    Konstantina Papanikolaou

    Computational linguist/scientific associate at ILSP/Athena RIC

    Konstantina Papanikolaou is a computational linguist and a scientific associate at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing of the Athena Research and Innovation Center. She holds a MSc in Language Technology from the National Technical University of Athens, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Department of Linguistics. She also holds a MA in Teaching Greek as a foreign language and a B.Sc. in Linguistics from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Department of Linguistics. Her research interests concern Natural Language Processing and Text Analytics. She also focuses on Information Extraction and Knowledge Bases, specifically on designing and building tools for Event Extraction.

      Elisavet Palogiannidi

      Master Student at School of Electronic and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Technical University of Crete

      Elisavet Palogiannidi is a Master Student at School of Electronic and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Technical University of Crete and she holds a diploma in the same school. She is also a research assistant at the Institute of communication and computer systems (ICCS). Her research interests focus on Natural Language Processing, Affective computing, Sentiment Analysis, Human Computer Interaction and Machine Learning.

        Dimitris Pappas

        Dimitris Pappas

          PENNY LABROPOULOU

          Penny Labropoulou is a researcher at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing/R.C. "Athena". She holds an MSc in Machine Translation (University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology) and a BA in English Language and Linguistics (University of Athens). Her research interests extend over the areas of Computational Lexicography and Lexicology and the wider domain of Language Resources (metadata modelling, design and implementation of infrastructures for archiving and sharing resources, design and construction of resources). She has authored several publications in these areas. She has worked as a lexicographer in the design and construction of monolingual and multilingual multimedia and print dictionaries of modern Greek. She has taught Computational lexicography in a Postgraduate course.

            MARIA GAVRIILIDOU

            Maria Gavriilidou is a linguist, researcher at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP)/ RC Athena in the field of computational linguistics. She has profound experience in the design, development and processing of language resources (textual resources, computational lexica, terminological lists and thesauri), in the design and use of metadata for language resources description and computational lexicography. She has participated in many European and national projects on language resources and related infrastructures. She has taught Computational Lexicography at postgraduate courses of the University of Athens and the National Technical University of Athens. She has coordinated the (or participated in the) construction of printed and electronic multimedia dictionaries for human users and in the design of educational material for the teaching of Greek as mother tongue, approved by the Ministry of Education and used in secondary education schools of the country. She has publications in Greek and international conferences, journals and books, in the areas of Computational Lexicography, Terminology and Language Resources creation, documentation and processing.

              STELIOS PIPERIDIS