Speakers & Lecturers

Keynote Speakers

Francesco Bonchi

Research Director
Centai, Turin, Italy
https://www.francescobonchi.com

Francesco Bonchi is Co-Founder and Research Director at Centai (Center for Artificial Intelligence), a newly established research center in Turin, Italy. He's also member of of the Board of Directors of Centai and CEO at SOM (Sound of Mind) S.r.l., the holding of researchers owning the 51% of Centai. Earlier he was Scientific Director at the ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy, where he was also coordinating the "Learning and Algorithms for Data Analytics" Research Area. Even earlier he was Director of Research at Yahoo Labs in Barcelona, Spain. He is also (part-time) Research Director for Big Data & Data Science at Eurecat (Technological Center of Catalunya), Barcelona.

His recent research interests include algorithms and learning on graphs and complex networks (e.g., financial networks, social networks, brain networks), fair and explainable AI, and more in general, privacy and all ethical aspects of data analysis and AI. He has more than 250 publications in these areas. He also filed 16 US patents, and got granted 9 US patents.

Talk: Algorithmic fairness beyond statistical parity: The case of fair matching and ranking

Michael Papka

Professor
The University of Illinois Chicago / Argonne National Laboratory
https://cs.uic.edu/profiles/papka-michael/

Michael E. Papka joined Argonne National Laboratory in 1992 and is now a senior scientist, a deputy associate laboratory director, and director of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science scientific supercomputing facility. He has been a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) since 2022. Before that, he was a faculty member at Northern Illinois University (NIU) from 2012 to 2022 and held the position of Presidential Research, Scholarship, and Artistry Professor of Computer Science. His research interests include scientific visualization, large-scale data analysis, high performance computing and building research infrastructure supporting science. Mike is an ACM Distinguished Member and IEEE Senior Member.

Talk: From Data to Discovery: Harnessing HPC and DOE Facilities for Scientific Progress

Sophia Ananiadou

Professor
University of Manchester, UK
https://www.nactem.ac.uk/profile.php?member=sananiadou

Sophia Ananiadou is Professor in Computer Science at The University of Manchester. Her main areas of research are Natural Language Processing and Biomedical Text Mining. She is the Director of the UK National Centre for Text Mining, Deputy Director of the Institute of Data Science and AI (Manchester), Turing Fellow, ELLIS member, Distinguished research fellow at the AI research centre (AIST Japan) and Lead Researcher at the Archimedes Research Unit, Athena. Her research interests evolved on how AI systems could acquire and exploit knowledge of language, particularly in biomedicine. Since 2002, she is co-instigator of a Special Interest Group within ACL (SIGBioMed) dedicated to language processing in the biological, biomedical, and clinical domain bringing together researchers in NLP, bioinformatics, and medical informatics.

Talk: Emotion detection for Misinformation and Conspiracy Detection

Tim Kraska

Professor
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
https://people.csail.mit.edu/kraska/

Tim Kraska is a director of applied science at Amazon Web Services (AWS), a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), co-director of MIT's Data System and AI LAB (DSAIL@CSAIL), and was a co-founder of Instancio and of Einblick Analytics (both acquired). Currently, his research focuses on using ML/GAI for data systems. Before joining MIT, Tim was an Assistant Professor at Brown and spent time at Google Brain. Tim is a 2017 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in computer science and received several awards including the VLDB Early Career Research Contribution Award, the Intel Outstanding Researcher Award, the VMware Systems Research Award, the university-wide Early Career Research Achievement Award at Brown University, an NSF CAREER Award, as well as several best paper and demo awards at VLDB, SIGMOD, and ICDE.

Talk: ML and Generative AI for data system

Course Speakers

Semih Salihoğlu

Professor
University of Waterloo, Canada
https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~ssalihog/

Semih Salihoğlu is an Associate Professor and a David R. Cheriton Faculty Fellow at University of Waterloo. He is also the CEO and co-founder of Kùzu, Inc, a spinoff company from his research group that develops and commercializes the Kùzu graph database management system. His research focuses on developing systems for managing, querying, or doing analytics on graph-structured data. He holds a PhD from Stanford University and is a recipient of the VLDB 2018 Best Paper, the VLDB 2022 Best Experiments and Analysis Paper, and a 2023 SIGMOD Research Highlights awards.

Talk: Modern Query Processing Techniques for Graph-structured Relations

Matteo Lissandrini

Professor
University of Verona, Italy
https://lissandrini.com/

Matteo Lissandrini is an Associate Professor in Computer Science in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Verona (Italy) where he is Member of the Steering Committee and coordinator of the Infrastructure workpackage for the Digital Arena for Inclusive Humanities (DAIH) research center. His work focuses on Data Exploration, Intelligent Data Management systems, and Knowledge Graphs.
Matteo has been an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Aalborg University (Denmark) and he has also been a Marie Skłodowska Curie IF fellow. He received his PhD from the University of Trento (Italy) with a thesis on exploratory search for information graphs.
Further, he is one of the organizers of the International Workshop on Search, Exploration, and Analysis in Heterogeneous Datastores (SEA Data).
Matteo is currently member of the Editorial Board of the VLDB Journal.
He has also served as a reviewer for many important conferences and journals in the fields of database technologies, data management, data mining, and information retrieval, and he has been recognized among the distinguished reviewers for VLDB for both the years 2022 and 2023.

Talk: Data Science with Graphs

Alexander Artikis

Professor
University of Piraeus, Greece
https://users.iit.demokritos.gr/~a.artikis/

Alexander Artikis is an Associate Professor in the University of Piraeus, in Athens, Greece. He is also a Senior Research Associate in the Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications at the National Centre for Scientific Research (NCSR) Demokritos, in Athens, Greece, where he leads the Complex Event Recognition lab (https://cer.iit.demokritos.gr). Alexander holds a PhD from Imperial College London on the topic of multi-agent systems, while his research interests lie in the area of Artificial Intelligence. He has published over 100 papers in related journals and conferences. According to Google Scholar, his h-index is 38. Alexander has been developing complex event recognition techniques in the context of several EU-funded Big Data projects, while he was the scientific coordinator in some of them. Furthermore, Alexander has been serving as a member of the (senior) programme committees of several international conferences, including AAAI, IJCAI, ECAI, AAMAS, KR, VLDB and CIKM. In 2020, he co-organised the Dagstuhl seminar on the “Foundations of Composite Event Recognition”.

Talk: Can computers understand what is happening? An introduction to complex event recognition

Periklis Mantenoglou

Research Associate
NCSR "Demokritos", Greece
https://www.iit.demokritos.gr/el/people/periklis-mantenoglou/

Periklis Mantenoglou is a research associate in the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications, NCSR "Demokritos" and a PhD candidate in the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He received an integrated masters degree (MSc-MEng) in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens. His research interests include logic programming, probabilistic reasoning, complex event recognition, stream reasoning and neuro-symbolic AI.

Talk: Can computers understand what is happening? An introduction to complex event recognition

Nikos Giatrakos

Assistant Professor
Technical University of Crete, Greece
http://users.softnet.tuc.gr/~ngiatrakos/index.html

Nikos Giatrakos is an Assistant Professor at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Technical University of Crete (Greece). He received the Diploma degree in Computer Science from the University of Piraeus (Greece) in 2006, the MSc degree in Information Systems from the Athens University of Economics and Business (Greece) in 2007, and the PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Piraeus (Greece) in 2012. His research interests are in the broad area of Big Data Management algorithms, software architectures and systems including Big streaming Data & Real-Time Analytics, Distributed/Decentralized Big Data Processing, Federated Machine Learning, Edge-to-Cloud Big Data Management, Synopses for Massive Data/Approximate Query Processing, Complex Event Processing. He was a recipient of the Best Demo Award in ACM CIKM 2020. He has contributed as one of key investigators in several recent EU projects, he has served as the co-coordinator of the EU H2020 project INFORE and as a Principal Investigator at the EU Horizon project EVENFLOW.

Talk: Proactive Streaming Analytics at Scale: A Journey from the State-of-the-art to a Production Platform

Athanasios (Nassos) Katsamanis

Principal Researcher
Athena R.C., Greece
https://www.ilsp.gr/en/members/katsamanis-athanasios-nassos/

Athanasios (Nassos) Katsamanis is a Principal Researcher at Athena R.C. since 2019 conducting research on dialogue systems, virtual assistants, multimodal human-computer interaction, and multimodal speech processing. He is currently teaching two graduate classes on Speech Technologies and on Conversational AI at the University of Athens. He is also the Tech Lead of Behavioral Signal Technologies, Inc. where he works with a team of engineers on research and development of conversation analytics based on affective computing of spoken interactions. Nassos got his M.Eng (with highest honors) and PhD from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 2003 and 2009 respectively, and after that, he worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Viterbi School of Engineering at USC for almost three years. He has conducted extensive research on computational modeling and understanding of human behavior based on multimodal processing and analysis of speech, facial expressions, and body language and has published more than 70 papers (cited more than 3000 times, source: Google Scholar) in these areas.

Talk: Exploring Large Language Models: Evolution, Evaluation, and Real-World Applications

Sokratis Sofianopoulos

Research Associate
Athena R.C., Greece
https://www.ilsp.gr/members/sofianopoulos-sokratis/

Sokratis Sofianopoulos received his Diploma in Computer Science from the University of Ioannina in 2002. His PhD thesis, titled “Language Modelling for Machine Translation Systems employing monolingual corpora” was awarded by the National Technical University of Athens in 2010. Since 2005, he has been a research associate at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing, Athena RC. He has actively participated in multiple research projects focusing on Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Translation, while also teaching graduate and undergraduate courses on machine learning, artificial intelligence and object-oriented programming. He has co-authored numerous journal and conference publications and has also served as a reviewer in conferences such as LREC, EAMT and COLING. His research interests are language modelling, machine translation, deep learning and evolutionary computation.

Talk: Exploring Large Language Models: Evolution, Evaluation, and Real-World Applications

Giorgos Paraskevopoulos

Research Associate
Athena R.C., Greece
https://georgepar.github.io/

Giorgos Paraskevopoulos received his Diploma Degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the National Technical University of Athens in June 2016. In 2024 he received his PhD from NTUA on Multimodal Processing using Deep Neural Networks. He has industry experience both as a software engineer (Intracom Telecom) and as a machine learning engineer (Behavioral Signals). In 2019 and 2022 he worked as an applied research intern with the Alexa team in Amazon Lab126 and the Amazon Transcribe team in AWS. Since 2020 he is a research associate at the Institute for Speech and Language Processing (ILSP) of Athena Research Center (ATHENA RC). He has co-authored over 20 publications, in international peer-reviewed conferences and journals, with over 700 citations. Giorgos is an IEEE/SPS member and has served as a reviewer in top-tier conferences, such as ACL, AAAI and Interspeech. He is an active open-source contributor. He has participated in several European and national research projects. His research interests revolve around the extraction and fusion of multimodal representations, transfer learning and adaptation of neural networks to unseen domains.

Talk: Exploring Large Language Models: Evolution, Evaluation, and Real-World Applications

Prokopis Prokopidis

Scientific Associate
Athena R.C., Greece
https://www.ilsp.gr/en/members/prokopidis-prokopis-2/

Prokopis Prokopidis is a research associate at the Institute for Language Processing/Athena RC. He has a Degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Athens (1993) and a MA in Computational Linguistics from the University of Essex (1998). He has participated in several Greek and European applied R&D projects in the areas of natural language processing, multilingual information extraction and language resource acquisition. He has been involved in the development of manually annotated linguistic resources for Greek and in the design and implementation of several tools for the automatic annotation of Greek texts at various levels of linguistic analysis. His work has been published in Greek and international conferences, journals and books.

Talk: Exploring Large Language Models: Evolution, Evaluation, and Real-World Applications

George Papadakis

R&D Engineer
PPC SA, Greece

George Papadakis is the Head of EU Proposal Writing Section at the R&D Department of PPC SA. Ηe received his PhD degree in Computer Science in 2013 from the Leibniz University of Hanover and his diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2007 from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). In the past, he worked at the Athena Research Center, the NTUA, the L3S Research Center and the NCSR "Demokritos". His research focuses on data integration and data mining, in general. He is currently involved in the Horizon Europe project EV4EU (https://ev4eu.eu), which develops business models and data-driven application that facilitate the adoption of V2X technologies.

Talk: Cutting-edge research in PPC

Konstantina Bereta

Research Director
Kpler, Greece

Dr. Konstantina Bereta serves as the Director of Research Labs at Kpler. She holds a BSc, an MSc, and a PhD in Computer Science from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Throughout her academic journey, she contributed significantly as a research assistant for 7 years within the Management of Data, Information, and Knowledge group (https://www.madgik.di.uoa.gr) before transitioning to the R&D department of MarineTraffic in 2019 (https://www.marinetraffic.com/research/), which was acquired by Kpler in 2023. With over a decade of experience as a researcher, Konstantina has co-authored more than 50 peer-reviewed publications spanning areas such as Big Data, AI, remote sensing, and geospatial data processing. In her current capacity, she leads research endeavors at the confluence of these disciplines, driving the creation of innovative solutions tailored to industrial requirements.

Talk: Challenges and achievements in Kpler R&D

Ippokratis Pandis

VP/Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services
AWS, USA
http://www.pandis.net/

Ippokratis Pandis is a VP/Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services responsible for the technical direction of AWS’s Analytics and Relational services. Ippokratis spends a lot of his time in Amazon Redshift. Redshift is Amazon's enterprise cloud data warehouse service. Previously, Ippokratis has held positions as software engineer at Cloudera, where he worked on the Impala SQL-on-Hadoop query engine, and as member of the research staff at the IBM Almaden Research Center, where he worked on IBM DB2 BLU.

Ippokratis received his PhD from the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the recipient of Best Demonstration awards at ICDE 2006 and SIGMOD 2011, and Test-of-Time award at EDBT 2019. He has served as PC chair of DaMoN 2014, DaMoN 2015, CloudDM 2016, HPTS 2019, ICDE Industrial 2022 and SIGMOD Industrial 2024, as well as General Chair of SIGMOD 2023 and the president of HPTS.

Talk: Data Management innovation at Amazon Web Services

Speakers & Lecturers

Keynote Speakers

Francesco Bonchi

Michael Papka

Sophia Ananiadou

Tim Kraska

Course Speakers

Semih Salihoğlu

Matteo Lissandrini

Alexander Artikis

Periklis Mantenoglou

Nikos Giatrakos

Athanasios (Nassos) Katsamanis

Sokratis Sofianopoulos

Giorgos Paraskevopoulos

Prokopis Prokopidis

George Papadakis

Konstantina Bereta

Ippokratis Pandis

Participate

Courses

Venue

Organizers & Committee

Speakers & Lecturers

Keynote Speakers

Francesco Bonchi

Michael Papka

Sophia Ananiadou

Tim Kraska

Course Speakers

Semih Salihoğlu

Matteo Lissandrini

Alexander Artikis

Periklis Mantenoglou

Nikos Giatrakos

Athanasios (Nassos) Katsamanis

Sokratis Sofianopoulos

Giorgos Paraskevopoulos

Prokopis Prokopidis

Invited & Sponsor Speakers

George Papadakis

Konstantina Bereta

Ippokratis Pandis

Participate

Courses

Venue

Organizers & Committee