Event Schedule
Program at Glance
Conference Hall – Pavillion 6 – Thessaloniki, GREECE
2021 KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Apostolos "Toli" Lerios
Former Mentor, Serial Entrepreneur and Engineer
Apostolos “Toli” Lerios
Former Mentor, Serial Entrepreneur and Engineer
Timos Sellis
Fellow ACM, IEEE Research Scientist, Facebook
Timos Sellis
Professor, FIEEE, FACM Director, Swinburne Data Science Research Institute
Dana Eleftheriadou
Head of Cities and Proximity Team
European Commission
Dana Eleftheriadou
Head of Cities and Proximity Team, European Commission, DG Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs
Ioannis Kotsiopoulos
Secretary General for Health Services
Ioannis Kotsiopoulos
Secretary General for Health Services
One Day event
14th October | Thursday
09:00 – 18:00
OPENING – INTRODUCTION
09:00 – 09:15
Stavros Kalafatis
Deputy Minister of Interior
(responsible for Macedonia-Thrace)
Opening - Introduction
Athanasios Kyriazis
Opening - Introduction
Angelos Charisteas
RTU of Digital Governance, Region of Central Macedonia
Opening - Introduction
ACCENTURE – PLATINUM SPONSOR
09:15 – 09:35
Nikolas Moschatos
Human Resources Lead, Accenture (Greece & Bulgaria)
Guest Speaker
Welcome
Nicolas Moschatos has over 25 years of experience in IT solutions development projects in large multinational companies, mainly as a Project Manager. His tenure in Accenture Greece began in 2000 as a Business Development Consultant in Information Technology, where for 7 years he took a leading role in the implementation of business projects in the telecommunications, retail and financial sectors in Greece and abroad. Since June 2007 he holds the position of Accenture’s Human Resources Lead in Greece.
In addition to his role in Greece, he has previously served as HR Lead at Accenture Hungary and Slovakia with key role in designing and implementing the local HR strategy. Since 2015, in parallel with his duties in Greece, he is the HR Lead of Accenture Bulgaria. He is a graduate from the Department of Business Administration of the University of Piraeus and holds a degree in Computer Analysis and Programming.
Thanasis Karousos
Strategy & Consulting Senior Manager, Accenture
Business Futures: Signals of Change
Thanasis is helping companies in Telecoms & Gaming industries to envision and execute their end-to-end transformation at speed and at scale using innovative technology services.
He is also helping them to drive competitive advantage by bringing together leaders in strategy, industry experts, enterprise function practitioners, business intelligence professionals, designers, data scientists, and many other specialized skills to co-create a unique path to transformation.
Thanasis has more than 15 years of experience in delivering large scale, complex, business critical and challenging strategy and consulting projects in the South-Eastern Europe.
09:35 – 09:50
Dimitris Papastergiou
President of Central Union of Greek Municipalities, Mayor of Trikala
The art of being smart (city)
Mayor of Trikala and President of the Central Union of Greek Municipalities (KEDE).
He was born in the city of Trikala in 1973, where he finished high school. He then studied electrical and computer engineering at the National Technical University of Athens by choice and for his passion for electronics and programming.
At the same time, he was involved with the design and construction of projects involving energy. The road of participation is a one way street if we want our lives to change. This is the reason I have been participating in the Local Government since the age of 29.
Between the years of 2014-2019 he was head of the political party “Restart Now” and was elected Mayor of Trikala. In 2019 he was also elected president of the Central Union of Greek Municipalities (KEDE) by my colleagues.
The milestones of my self-governing path is the initiative we took for the city branding of Trikala, the creation of a smart city, the implementation of the anti-smoking law, the administration and management of refugees and the change of our mentality.
His goal is to create really smart and sustainable cities, with strong and modern Municipalities.
He is married to Civil Engineer, Soula Braki and they have three children.
He rides a bike because it is a lifestyle he chooses and supports.
Session 1: Challenges in Next Generation Health Systems
Coordinator:
Simos Veloudis, Associate Professor, CITY College, University of York Europe Campus
Senior Researcher, SEERC
09:50 – 10:30
Ioannis Kotsiopoulos
Secretary General for Health Services
Keynote Speaker
Towards a national Learning Health System
Dr Ioannis Kotsiopoulos was born in Athens and studied Mathematics at the University of Athens. He continued his postgraduate studies in Manchester where he graduated with an MSc in Decision Technologies. He continued his research in decision support systems, optimisation techniques and data science problems, participated in several UK and EU funded research projects and published several papers in esteemed international conferences and academic journals. His PhD discusses semantic interoperability challenges in large scale data integration problems in the healthcare sector.
Ioannis has worked in senior management roles both in Greece and the UK and has led many digital transformation initiatives. He was a founding member of the Greek DRG Institute, Deputy Chief Executive of Nea Ionia Hospital, Chief Information Officer in Dorset County Hospital, member of the NHS Digital Academy and most recently Secretary General for Health Services in Greece.
Ioannis has coordinated the response of the Greek Healthcare System against the pandemic and at the same time he designed a very ambitious eHealth Programme which will be funded by the Recovery and Resilience Fund. Ioannis is particularly interested in healthcare quality and learning health systems and he played a key role in the establishment of the new Organisation for Healthcare Quality in Greece (ODIPY) and the Regional Office for Healthcare Quality of the World Health Organisation in Athens.
10:30 – 10:45
Kostis Kaggelidis
Founder and CEO of Gnomon Informatics S.A.
Lessons from the pandemic: using digital health to transform healthcare
Mr. Kaggelides is founder and CEO of Gnomon Informatics S.A. and is currently vice chairman of the management board of the association of IT companies of North Greece (SEPVE).
He holds a M.Sc. in Knowledge Based Systems from the Artificial Intelligence Department, University of Edinburgh, UK, and a Electrical Engineering degree from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.
Mr. Kaggelides presents 25 years’ experience in the development of information systems, services and products with responsibilities ranging from project implementation to project team set up and technology and strategy selection up to business planning and product management.
He has been the project leader in several national and EU R&D projects, in the fields of eHealth, Healthcare eProcurement, optimisation and intelligent processing.
He has been a reviewer for EU R&D project, member of European Commission Expert Group in eTendering (eTEG) and member of the national technology Foresight Programme.
10:45 – 11:00
Dimitrios Fotiadis
Professor, University of Ioannina / FORTH
Artificial Intelligence Tools in Healthcare
He is currently a Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, Greece, where he is also the Director of the Unit of Medical Technology and Intelligent Information Systems, and is also an Affiliated Member of Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas, Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, Dept. of Biomedical Research.
He was a Visiting Researcher at the RWTH, Aachen, Germany, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston. He has coordinated and participated in more than 250 R&D funded projects (in FP6, FP7, H2020, and national Projects), being the coordinator (e.g. INSILC, TAXINOMISIS, HOLOBALANCE, CARDIOCARE etc.) and Technical coordinator (e.g. SMARTOOL, KARDIATOOL, TO_AITION, etc.). He is the author or coauthor of more than 300 papers in scientific journals, 500 papers in peer-reviewed conference proceedings, and more than 50 chapters in books. He is also the author/editor of 30 books. His work has received more than 18,000 citations (h-index=68).
He is IEEE EMBS Fellow, EAMBES Fellow, Fellow of IAMBE, member of the IEEE Technical Committee of information Technology in Healthcare, Editor in Chief of IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, Member of the Editorial Board in IEEE Reviews in Biomedical Engineering, Associate Editor for IEEE Open Journal in Engineering in Biology and Medicine and Computers in Biology and Medicine.
His research interests include multiscale modelling of human tissues and organs, intelligent wearable/implantable devices for automated diagnosis, processing of big medical data, machine learning, sensor informatics, image informatics, and bioinformatics. He is the recipient of many scientific awards including the one by the Academy of Athens. He is the co-founder of PD Neurotechnology Ltd, UK.
11:00 – 11:20
Q&A
11:20 – 11:40
Break
Session 2: Smart Cities: Services, Infrastructure, Green Deal Impact
Coordinator:
Periklis Chatzimisios, Professor (International Helenic University (Greece) and University of Mexico (USA))
11:40 – 12:20
Dana Elefteriadou
Head of Cities and Proximity Team, European Commission, DG Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs
Keynote Speaker
Intelligent cities: driving a green, digital and resilient recovery
Dana Eleftheriadou steers EU policy development on intelligent cities, advanced technologies, artificial intelligence with the view to foster Europe’s technological and industrial leadership and drive the green and digital transition and social welfare.
She designed the Intelligent Cities Challenge initiative, which helps over 130 EU cities to lead a green and digital recovery with the support of cutting-edge technologies. She spearheads work on the Tech4Good initiative designed to advance social, environmental and economic causes, and on Local Green Deals.
She served as the EU coordinator of the high-level group Strategic Policy Forum on Digital Entrepreneurship and negotiated EU positions in international dialogues, such as the G7 ICT and Industry Ministerial and at the G20 dialogue for Innovative Growth. She is the co-author of the World Economic Forum Global IT Report and member of the World Economic Forum Digital Leaders Group.
Dana Eleftheriadou holds an MBA from Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), a master in Computer Engineering from the University of Patras, Greece and a diploma in Philosophy from MIT, USA.
12:20 – 12:35
Sotiris Karagiannis
Chief Innovation Officer, Space Hellas
Why Digital is the path for Inclusive, Safe, Resilient and Sustainable Cities
https://www.linkedin.com/in/karagiannis/
https://twitter.com/skaragiannis
He holds a degree in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science (AI & CS Honors 1993) from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland UK.
In his 30 years career in Information Technology, he has been an early Internet Technology Entrepreneur & Business Consultant for Public and Private Organizations has held senior management business executive positions and was a pioneer in designing and implementing SaaS and Cloud Enterprise Solutions on Application monitoring, CyberSecurity, and Collaborative intelligent agent systems.
Mr. Karagiannis is now focused solely on Commercial Technology Innovation and Global Business Development.
With significant experience in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Enterprise SaaS, Mr. Karagiannis is frequently invited as a speaker in business and technology conferences and Universities to speak about AI, Technology Entrepreneurship, Startups, and Venture Capital, he’s mentoring and advising technology startups in Europe and Silicon Valley on AI and the impact on the Future of Work and is active on Twitter and Social Media in the fields of AI, Future Of Work and Collaborative Knowledge Sharing, Digital upskilling and reskilling.
12:35 – 12:50
Yannis Damianos
President, LINK Technologies
Smart City Applications and Architecture
Dr Yannis Damianos is the Founder, President and Managing Director of LINK Technologies, one of the most Innovative and successful Telematics Technology company in Europe, based in Thessaloniki and Athens.
Before 1993 he was the Senior Engineering Manager of DEC in Reading and Basingstoke, United Kingdom with personal contribution in the DEC Networking Product success.
Before that he was the Manager for IBM’s Centre of Competence in the UK and USA for 10 years.
He has a PhD, MSc and BSc in Computer Design with several Invention Disclosures and Awards in the Design of Computers and Networking Products.
He taught at Southampton University, England and New York Technology Institute and has published articles in Technical Journals in the Design of Networking Products.
12:50 – 13:10
Q&A
13:10 – 14:10
Lunch break
Session 3: Technology and Innovation: Why, How, Who?
Coordinator:
Konstantinos Fouskas, Associate Professor (University of Macedonia)
14:10 – 14:50
Apostolos "Toli" Lerios
Keynote Speaker
Post-Pandemic Angel Investing in Greece
Mr. Lerios has eagerly accepted the invitation of the organizing committee. Mr. Lerios is a serial entrepreneur who mentors an eclectic menagerie of startups worldwide.
He was cofounder of Metanautix, a Silicon Valley big data analytics infrastructure startup that was acquired by Microsoft. He has worked at Facebook.
Toli has been granted 30 patents by the US Patent and Trademark Office. He holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Stanford University and he has been awarded the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching and two Fairclough Prizes from Stanford’s Classics Department.
Toli has given several invited lectures at universities, TEDx events, and other forums.
14:50 – 15:05
Dimitrios Lakasas
Wise industry 4.0 management
Dimitris Lakasas was born on April 14, 1973 in Kolindros, Pieria.
He is the CEO of Olympia Electronics S.A.
Dimitrios Lakasas is the writer of the book “ Anthropos 4.0 – a wise management of industry 4.0”
In 2017 he was announced the “Innovative Entrepreneur of the Year” in the EY -ERNST & YOUNG competition.
In addition to his business activity he has been:
- Chairman on Greek International Business Association (SEVE) 2010-2014
- Chairman on Alexander Iinnovation Zone (AIZ) 2013-2015
- Board Member of Hellenic Federation of Enterprises (SEV) 2004-2019
- Βoard Member of the Federation of Industries of Northern Greece (SBBE) since1999
- Founder of Think Tank SEVE
He has participated in international conferences and publications in financial and sectoral press.
He holds an MBA (Master of Business Administration) (UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD) and a Bachelor on Economics and Marketing (CITY COLLEGE – UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD).
15:05 – 15:20
Antonios Gypakis
General Secretariat for Research and Innovation (GSRI)
Vasileios Gongolidis
General Secretariat for Research and Innovation (GSRI)
Promoting technology and Innovation based on data
Dr. Antonios Gypakis (PhD. MSc, MBA)
Dr. Antonios Gypakis (PhD. MSc, MBA) is head of the Policy Planning Department of the General Secretariat for Research and Innovation (GSRI) / Ministry of Development and Investments. He is a member of the Sectoral Scientific Council for Environmental Sciences, Energy and Sustainable Mobility. In the framework of his duties he coordinates the Innovation platform of GSRI “Environment, Sustainable Development and Circular Economy”. He is representing GSRI in the Monitoring Committees of regional Operational Programmes. He is a National Representative in the Shadow Committee of the EU Framework Programme “Horizon Europe” – Sub group ‘Food, Bio-economy, Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment’ as well as National Representative in the Programme Committee of the EU Coal and Steel Programme. Furthermore, he is the Deputy National Representative in the group of MS Representatives for the Joint Undertaking “Fuel Cells and Hydrogen 2”. He participates in a number of Inter-ministerial Committees as well as EU Committees on Environment, Bioeconomy, Logistics, Energy, implementing the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as well as implementing the EU Strategy for the Adriatic-Ionian Region (EUSAIR) i.a. His previous position was at the National Hellenic Research Foundation as an expert in Technology Transfer in the fields of Environment and Renewable Energy Sources.
Vasileios Gongolidis (MSc)
Vasileios Gongolidis (MSc) is a policy officer on RDI at General Secretariat for Research and Innovation, Ministry of Development and Investments, Greece. He holds a University degree in Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and a Masters degree in Management of Complex Technical and Economic Systems also from NTUA. He is mainly involved in RDI policy planning strategy and monitoring of implementation with emphasis on ICT. He has been appointed as coordinator of the national triple-helix innovation platform for ICT, taking Initiatives in order to strengthen public and private sector collaboration, enhance human research potential, support national research infrastructures and promote public research centers extroversion. He has served as Greek national representative at various European Commission committees related to ICT and Innovation in Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe programs. He is also member of committees and groups of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) related to Science, Technology and Innovation. His previous position was at the Division of Applied Technologies at the National Center for Scientific Research “Demokritos”.
15:20 – 15:35
Nikos Pleros
How can light “escape” a Greek University: optical technologies and innovation
Dr. Nikos Pleros joined the faculty of the Department of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in September 2007, where he is currently serving as an Associate Professor.
His research interests extend along a broad range of photonic technologies and their use for communications, computing and sensing, including photonic neural networks, optical RAMs, optical interconnects, photonic integrated circuit technologies, optical switching and fiber-wireless for 5G mobile networks.
He has more than 350 archival journal publications and conference presentations including several invited contributions, while his work has been cited >4000 times (GS). He holds 3 US Patents in the fields of photonic biosensing and neuromorphic photonics that are currently utilized towards producing innovative products by two corresponding start-up companies in Cyprus and USA, respectively.
He has held positions of responsibility at several major conference committees including ECOC, OFC and SPIE Photonics West and has coordinated several FP7 and H2020 European projects.
He has received the 2003 IEEE Photonics Society Graduate Student Fellowship, the 2018 AUTH Excellence Award for his research project funding ID, the 2021 Greek Innovator Award and the 2021 AUTH Excellence Award for Innovation and Research.
15:35 – 15:50
Evan Kotsovinos
The $1T Dollar Question: How Hybrid Cloud Powers American Express
Evan Kotsovinos is Senior Vice President and Global Head of Infrastructure for American Express. In this role, he oversees the company’s infrastructure, including the mainframe systems, data centers, cloud engineering and operations, data services and platforms, and technology operations. Evan is responsible for managing an annual budget of over $1 billion and a team of over 5,000 people around the world.
Evan joined American Express from Morgan Stanley, where he served as Asia CIO with responsibility for all technology services and resources in the region. Previously, Evan held a series of increasingly responsible engineering and leadership positions within Morgan Stanley, in which he spearheaded major business-aligned transformation efforts in Asia and drove the technology integration of the company’s securities joint venture in China.
Evan began his career as a Senior Research Scientist with Deutsche Telekom Laboratories and is a recognized leader in cloud computing, having led the team that developed one of the first cloud computing systems in the early 2000s at the University of Cambridge. Evan holds a Doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge and a Master’s in Finance from London Business School.
15:50 – 16:10
Q&A
16:10 – 16:30
Break
Session 4: Artificial Intelligence: The New Era
Coordinator:
Anastasios Gounaris, Associate Professor (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
16:30 – 17:10
Timos Sellis
Fellow ACM, IEEE,
Research Scientist, Facebook
Keynote Speaker
Re-configuring data practices for Intelligent, Reliable and Responsible decision making systems
Timos Sellis is a Research Scientist at Facebook (USA) and an Adjunct Professor at Swinburne University of Technology (Australia), where between 2016 and 2020 he was a Professor and the Inaugural Director of the Data Science Research Institute. He got his Diploma degree in Electrical Engineering in 1982 from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece. In 1983 he got the M.Sc. degree from Harvard University (USA) and in 1986 the Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Berkeley (USA), both in Computer Science.
He has been in the past a faculty member at the University of Maryland (USA, 1986-92), the National Technical University of Athens (Greece, 1992-2013), and RMIT University (Australia, 2013-2016). Prof. Sellis was also the Director of a new research institute he founded in Greece, the Institute for the Management of Information Systems (IMIS) of the “Athena” Research Center (www.imis.athena-innovation.gr) between 2007 and 2013.
His research interests include big data, data streams, graph data management, data integration, and spatio- temporal database systems. He has published over 280 articles in refereed journals and international conferences in the above areas, has over 17,200 citations to his work and has participated and co-ordinated several national and european research projects.
Prof. Sellis is a recipient of the prestigious Presidential Young Investigator (PYI) award given by the President of USA to the most talented new researchers (1990), and of the VLDB 1997 10 Year Paper Award in 1997 (awarded to the paper published in the proceedings of the VLDB 1987 conference that had the biggest impact in the field of database systems in the decade 1987-97). He was the president of the National Council for Research and Technology of Greece (2001-2003).
In November 2009, he was awarded the status of IEEE Fellow, for his contributions to database query optimization, and spatial data management, and in November 2013 the status of ACM Fellow, for his contributions to database query optimization, spatial data management, and data warehousing.
In March 2018 he received the IEEE TCDE Impact Award, for contributions to database systems research and broadening the reach of data engineering research.
17:10 – 17:25
Anastasios Kementsietsidis
Tech Lead/Manager, Google
Language & Structured Knowledge
Anastasios Kementsietsidis is a Tech Lead/Manager at Google Research working on language understanding technologies that are used across Google products.
Before joining Google, Anastasios was a researcher at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and was part of the core team that released DB2-RDF (NoSQL Graph) Support in IBM DB2.
Anastasios has a PhD in computer science from the University of Toronto. He has over 60 publications in top-tier conferences, including a best paper award in ICDE 2007, a best demo award in EDBT 2006,
and his CIKM 2009 paper was a runner-up for a best paper award. Anastasios has over 30 US patents, and his work has received more than 5K citations.
He has served on the program committee of several leading conferences and workshops.
17:25 – 17:40
Konstantinos Chlouverakis
Analytics & Digital Leader, Deloitte
From tech-enabled strategy to AI industrialization
Kostis Chlouverakis is currently the Deloitte Digital and Analytics & Cognitive Lead for the past two years.
Kostis is helping companies embrace and adopt new exponential technologies and trends such as machine learning, Salesforce and data-driven customer experience.
Before that, Kostis was Group Chief Digital Officer at Eurobank after spending many years in the US working in analytics & digital consulting where he actively participated in global (Fortune 500) projects, managing international teams.
Kostis holds an MBA from MIT Sloan (USA), a PhD in Electronic Systems Engineering (UK) and a degree in Physics (GR).
His main interests and expertise focus on digital strategy, data experience, machine learning and analytics, and how companies can exploit and monetize their internal and external data and expand and hone their digital capabilities.
17:40 – 17:55
Anastasios Drosou
AI in Cybersecurity
- Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering, A.U.Th.
- MSc. in Communication Engineering, T.U.M.
- PhD in Communications and Signal Processing, ICL.
Dr. Anastasios Drosou has participated in both the management and the Research & Development of several research projects, national and European funded ones (6th & 7th Framework Programme; H2020).
His prior professional experience includes consultancy services to large industries abroad, as well as employments as Research Associate for both the Chair for Electronic Design Automation and the Chair for Nanotechnology in the Technische Universitat Munchen, as well as for Infineon Technologies AG. Munich.
Earlier he has also served as Research Associate for both CERTH-ITI and the Art Diagnosis Centre “ORMYLIA”.
17:55 – 18:15