Author: leokalpakis

Μπορούν οι καθημερινές συνήθειες να μειώσουν τον κίνδυνο καρκίνου; Το έργο ONCODIR απαντά Το παρακάτω άρθρο, που δημοσιεύθηκε από το Αθηναϊκό–Μακεδονικό Πρακτορείο Ειδήσεων (ΑΠΕ–ΜΠΕ), παρουσιάζει βασικά ευρήματα του ευρωπαϊκού έργου ONCODIR, το οποίο εξετάζει πώς οι αλλαγές στον τρόπο ζωής —ιδίως η τακτική άσκηση και η υγιεινή διατροφή— μπορούν να μειώσουν σημαντικά τον κίνδυνο εμφάνισης καρκίνου του παχέος εντέρου. Το έργο ONCODIR συντονίζει η  Ομάδα M4D του Ινστιτούτου Τεχνολογιών Πληροφορικής (ΙΠΤΗΛ) του ΕΚΕΤΑ στην Ελλάδα με επιστημονικά υπεύθυνο τον Δρ. Στέφανο Βροχίδη. Καθοριστική συμμετοχή στο έργο έχει μεταξύ άλλων, ο μεταδιδακτορικός ερευνητής Θανάσης Μαυρόπουλος. Οι ερευνητές της εν λόγω ομάδας ανέλυσαν δεδομένα από περισσότερες από 200 επιστημονικές μελέτες. Τα συμπεράσματά τους δείχνουν ότι, παρόλο που όλοι αντιμετωπίζουν έναν ορισμένο κίνδυνο ανάπτυξης καρκίνου του παχέος εντέρου (ιδίως όσοι έχουν οικογενειακό ιστορικό), η διατήρηση ενός υγιεινού τρόπου ζωής…

Our nationally funded project, CoFLy (Cognitive Operations of micro-Flying vehicles),which focuses on developing innovative operations for Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) systems, has been labelled as a “Successive Example” by the Competitiveness, Entrepreneurship & Innovation Committee. The main objective of the CoFly project was to insert pioneering functionalities in Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) systems, aiming at reducing the operational cost as well as to incorporate intelligent modules assisting non-expert users in proper manipulation. To this end and far beyond the simple remote control of MAVs, CoFly integrates advanced cognitive capabilities, enabling autonomous navigation, perception, decision-making, and adaptability to new data.   [caption id="attachment_6988" align="aligncenter" width="512"] Picture 1. Field testing by the CoFly consortium team[/caption]   The project has proven its impact on the precision agriculture domain. Field trials conducted over two…

The MultiRATE project successfully concluded its activities with a high-profile final event held on May 28th, 2025, at the Titania Hotel in Athens, Greece. Organised by M4D, the event gathered over 40 participants, including researchers, industry stakeholders, policy makers, and representatives from EU agencies such as the Policy Officer and SSRI Area Coordinator from DG Home as well as the Project Officer from REA as, and EUROPOL. MultiRATE paved the way of the holistic evaluation of the readiness level of solutions developed in the security domain and will be available to the entire R&D community. M4D served as the coordinator of the MultiRATE project, overseeing both the scientific and technical management throughout its duration. It also played a key role in developing the project’s Technology Readiness Level (TRL) framework and…

M4D Group, as the Scientific & Technical Manager of AINATURE Project, participated in the second PSC/Plenary meeting of AINATURE, hosted by AGGRA, on 19-20 of March 2025, in Zadar, Croatia. During the meeting CERTH and UNIVPM presented the deliverables that were prepared and submitted during the 1st reporting period, until February 2025. presented the deliverables prepared and submitted during the 1st reporting period, until February 2025. This section was followed by the presentation of the forthcoming deliverables for the 2nd reporting period, due in August 2025. An extensive analysis of the reporting process was presented, supported by visual paradigms. The meeting included also a visit to the associate partner, i.e. the Firefighters Association of Zadar County, where the partners had the opportunity to view the equipment of the volunteer firefighters…

On the 19th of March 2025, the Community for European Research and Innovation for Security (CERIS) organised a thematic workshop on the issue of Missing Persons. The event was hosted by DG HOME in Brussels and brought together a wide range of participants across different disciplines ranging from social sciences and humanities to information technologies, including representatives of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), research/academia, industry, law enforcement, as well as members of the public, to thoroughly address the prevention of and the challenges stemming from people going missing, exploring in parallel innovative solutions and relevant responses. The workshop started with a welcome speech by the Director, Innovation & Audit Directorate, DG HOME, and an invited speech by the President of the Police Network of Missing Persons (PEN-MP) who provided an overview of the…

Μ4D Group participated in The Video Retrieval Competition 2025, with the VERGE system, an interactive video content retrieval system designed for browsing a collection of images extracted from videos and conducting targeted content searches. VERGE incorporates a variety of retrieval methods and fusion techniques. It also offers a user-friendly web application for query formulation and displaying top results. VBS is an international video content search competition that evaluates the state-of-the-art of interactive video retrieval systems. It is performed annually as a special session at the International Conference on MultiMedia Modeling (MMM) since 2012. The competition aims to push research on large-scale video retrieval systems that are effective, fast, and easy to use for content search scenarios that are truly relevant in practice (e.g., known-item search in an ever-increasing video archive,…

The submission deadline for the Special Issue on “Image Processing and Computer Vision Sensing Technologies in Engineering Applications and Digital Twins” has been extended until the 30th of June 2025!   Click here for full details.

MaaSAI project, coordinated by M4D Group, aims to revolutionise manufacturing and remanufacturing processes by facilitating access to flexible and decentralised capacities, through the Manufacturing as a Service (MaaS) business model, that extends the principles of the service-oriented economy to the manufacturing industry. MaaSAI aims to reduce the heavy investments that manufacturers have traditionally had to make to set up and maintain their operations. With an emphasis on production flexibility, agility and responsiveness, the MaaSAI project enables on-demand manufacturing, reducing waste and optimising resource utilisation, facilitating the transition towards more sustainable and circular facilities, and promoting better integration of the value chain. The MaaSAI project leverages Explainable Artificial Intelligence (xAI) in autonomous agents to negotiate the use of manufacturing capacities between providers and consumers in a dynamic MaaS ecosystem. The incorporation…

The event was successfully held on Friday, September 27th at the Thessaloniki Concert Hall. Many educational organizations and institutes participated while M4D Group made a strong presence at the Researchers' Night in Greece! The team brought the colors of tradition with them! The Project Chromata (ΧΡΩΜΑΤΑ) shared a new perspective on the preservation and reuse of our traditional values, through a digital world where cultural heritage is transcribed and projected through 3D virtual spaces. The platform combines artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and computer vision techniques to create virtual environments. Through the 3D virtual spaces of the platform, the visitors explored a new digital world where the cultural heritage is transcribed and displayed traditional customs, such as the “Anastenaria”, the “Kodonofori” and the Thracian wedding. We put on our VR glasses…

We are very excited that this year, the M4D Group of ITI-CERTH will play a leading role in the Core Organizing Group of the RISE-SD 2024 Symposium, which will be held on October 16-17 in Chalkidiki, Greece. Ηaving a leading role in multiple R&D European Projects, we support the research and development in the security sector. The “Research and Innovation Symposium for European Security and Defense 2024” (RISE-SD 2024) is a European Research and Innovation event focused on presenting and demonstrating technologies, frameworks, methodologies and results of EU R&D projects beneficial to end-users in the field of Fighting Crime and Terrorism, Disaster and Crisis Management, Critical Infrastructure Protection, Cybersecurity and Border Management Research among others. Furthermore, Panels & Workshops will be led by experts, EC officers and representatives of R&D…

We are proud to announce that TESTUDO project, coordinated by the M4D Group, has become a member of the European Cluster for Securing Critical Infrastructures (ECSCI). The main objective of the cluster is to create synergies and foster emerging disruptive solutions to security issues via cross-projects collaboration and innovation. TESTUDO project will contribute to the main objective of the ECSCI via cross-projects collaboration in terms of communication and dissemination activities as well as by exploring possibilities for scientific and technical cooperation. Furthermore, TESTUDO will actively support ECSCI activities and events, and provide input in the development of Critical Infrastructure Protection Standards and Regulations. TESTUDO (Autonomous swarm of heterogeneous resources in infrastructure protection via threat prediction and prevention) is an EU funded research project aiming to utilize state-of-the-art technologies for detection,…

On 26-27 of March, M4D/MKLab/ ITI-CERTH Group researchers Konstantinos Karystinakis and Ilias Gialampoukidis participated in the Water market Europe and presented the project Climempower as the latest research of the group in the domains of climate resilience and climate adaptation. ClimEmpower aims to bring together 14 organizations with a common mission to empower five South-European regions (Andalusia, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece and Sicily) facing high climate change (CC) risk and exceptionally low adaptive capacity to enhance their CC resilience. Our aim, as a consortium, is to enhance their CC resilience by establishing regional Communities of Practice (CoP) and co-creating resilient development strategies tailored to the needs and potentials of the participating regions. M4D - Multimodal Data Fusion and Analytics Group is a project partner and a Case Study Facilitator for the…

The M4D/MKLab-ITI-CERTH team successfully participated in the 1st Robotic and Automation Expo held in Athens, Greece from April 12th to 14th, representing CERTH alongside ITI Robotics Lab. Throughout the three-day event, M4D researchers showcased the successful outcomes of various ongoing and concluded EU-Horizon Research and Innovation projects, including ASHVIN, ISOLA, LAW GAME, and DIH^2. In addition to videos, leaflets, and banners, M4D provided live virtual reality demonstrations of the LAW-GAME project, aimed at enhancing the training of law enforcement personnel in crime scene detection, evaluation, and analysis. Visitors had the opportunity to experience the VR simulation firsthand by wearing VR headsets and completing specific tasks guided by M4D researchers. Among the advanced technical solutions showcased at CERTH's booth, M4D highlighted digital twin technologies, data fusion and artificial intelligence techniques supporting…

Being the Coordinator of the European project TESSERA, the M4D group together with the Visual Computing Lab (VCL), both groups of CERTH-ITI, hosted the kick-off meeting of the project which is entitled “TESSERA – Towards thE dataSetS for the European SEcurRity DAta Space for Innovation''. The meeting took place on March 6 and 7, 2024, at CERTH’s premises in Thessaloniki, Greece. TESSERA is a two-year project, funded by the European Union within the framework of the Internal Security Fund project grants and aims to conduct the preparatory work for the creation of high-quality large-scale trusted and shareable datasets based on identified operational use cases supporting the European Security Data Space for Innovation. The project also aims to specify the low-level architecture of the data-related national components of the European Security…

Αναγνωρίζοντας τη σπουδαιότητα του ρόλου των βιντεοπαιχνιδιών στο σύγχρονο πολιτιστικό περιβάλλον, η ομάδα του M4D/ΙΠΤΗΛ/EKETA παρουσιάζει ένα νέο τριετές ευρωπαϊκό έργο, το i-Game, το οποίο συντονίζει. H εναρκτήρια συνάντηση του έργου πραγματοποιήθηκε στις 20 και 21 Φεβρουαρίου 2024, στις εγκαταστάσεις του Εθνικού Κέντρου Έρευνας και Τεχνολογικής Ανάπτυξης (ΕΚΕΤΑ). Γενικός στόχος του έργου είναι να δημιουργήσει μια συμπεριληπτική πλατφόρμα ανάπτυξης παιχνιδιών ανοιχτού κώδικα, που θα διευκολύνει τη συνδημιουργία τους από διαφορετικά ενδιαφερόμενα μέρη, σε πολιτιστικούς και δημιουργικούς τομείς και βιομηχανίες (CCSI), για την ενίσχυση της καινοτομίας με θετικό αντίκτυπο στην κοινωνική συνοχή και βιωσιμότητα. Η συνεργατική πλατφόρμα θα στηρίξει την κοινότητα του έργου, πέρα από την προσφορά πληθώρας ψηφιακών εργαλείων, στον καθορισμό, το σχεδιασμό και την υλοποίηση σχέσεων, συνεργασιών και παιχνιδιών. Βασικά στοιχεία ώστε εν τέλει η πρωτοβουλία να μετατραπεί σε…

The three-day 1st Plenary Meeting of the ONCODIR Project, led by M4D/ITI/CERTH, was held at Nicosia, Cyprus on 23rd-25th of January 2024. ONCODIR Project concerns the Evidence-based Participatory Decision Making for Cancer Prevention through implementation research. Through this project we will identify risk factors associated with colorectal cancer and we will integrate multidisciplinary research methods and technologies (including health policy analytics, artificial intelligence and decision support theories) to deliver evidence-based and personalized recommendations on colorectal cancer prevention. During these three days the teams focused on the main objectives of the project underling the following: Identify main correlations, barriers and significant factors of CRC Ensure equal and affordable access to cancer prevention strategies for everyone between and within EU countries Provide innovative AI-powered personalized prevention approaches Enhance the ongoing evidence-based CRC…

The 3rd Plenary meeting of the MultiRATE project which took place on December 13rd - 14th, 2023 at the Donostia-San Sebastián,Spain was a good reason to present both the development and improvement of the project itself and its importance in the EU R&D community. The Horizon Europe MultiRATE project, coordinated by M4D/ ITI/ CERTH, represents a holistic framework for the MatUrity evaLuaTIon of ReAdiness level for security Technologies. The project aims to develop a holistic, homogenous and harmonized RL evolution methodology and calculator for R&D projects and solutions in the security domain, available to the EU R&D community. During the 2nd consortium Plenary Meeting, a short internal workshop was held between the consortium partners while at the same time the Readiness Levels (RLs) and the progress in the Work Packages…

The H2020 project ‘xR4DRAMA’ (Extended Reality For DisasteR management And Media plAnning) coordinated by CERTH - ITI - M4D, has been selected for publication in the ‘Results in Brief’ section of the European Commission’s CORDIS website, under the thematic category of ‘Extended reality enhances effective disaster management’. The article is available in six languages, while this publication adheres to the European Commission's strategy on the dissemination and exploitation of research results, allowing the public to see the benefit of the EU's science investment. The article describes how the use of XR technologies can support two real-life scenarios, for example by creating realistic training experiences and offering a better understanding of a given disaster site that can be shared with First Responders. As the coordination representatives from CERTH-ITI, Dr. Stefanos Vrochidis,…

The teams of M4D, CERTH and CDXi stood out once again, responding with great success to the challenges set in the Confluence Challenge – Driving Innovation Together. They were among the top positions of the competition, winning four prizes. Confluence Challenge – Driving Innovation is an open innovation program bringing together corporations looking for innovative solutions to industry chal-lenges, with entrepreneurs and researchers working at the forefront of tech-nology. The final event took place on Monday, December 4, 2023, at the Cen-ter for the Dissemination of Research Results of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. The goal of the program is to transform the open (collaborative) innovation into a tool for tackling complex technological problems and make it available to modern industry. Aiming at the substantial strengthening of the innovation ecosystem…

The Next Stage Sustainability Bootcamp by the Alexander Innovation Zone in Thessaloniki, executed by Ideas Forward and supported by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom Greece, takes place for the third consecutive year, uniting organizations, startups, researchers, and businesses under the umbrella of sustainability and innovation. CDXi, a spin-off company of CERTH, derived from the M4D Group, addressed to the future, applying state-of-the-art artificial intelligence solutions for sustainable practices in both water management in the agri-food sector and on the path to digital transformation. More specifically, the company uses the satellite images of the Copernicus program, combining the measurements from the available terrestrial sensors, with the aim of mapping the problems that arise in production. [caption id="attachment_5844" align="aligncenter" width="491"]P.1 Pollution of water reservoirs leads to low quality water, which is…

We are excited to share the Best Full Paper Award at the 2023 International Conference on Interactive Mobile Communication Technologies and Learning (IMCL). M4D/MKLab group researchers led the authoring of the award-winning paper “Evaluation of Explainable Artificial Intelligence methods in Language Learning Classification of Spanish Tertiary Students”. In the language learning domain, teachers face challenges regarding the classification of the students’ learning capabilities and building the appropriate learning path for them. To address these challenges the team adopted the concept of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), aiming to classify Spanish Tertiary Education Learners, in terms of their performance and interpret the hidden relationships among general characteristics and students’ learning profile.  XAI is a set of processes and methods that allows human users to interpret, understand and trust the results derived from…

The M4D group being the Coordinator of the European project VANGUARD, together with the Visual Computing Lab (VCL), both groups of CERTH-ITI, hosted the kick-off meeting of the project which is entitled "VANGUARD – adVANced technoloGical solutions coupled with societal-oriented Understanding and AwaReness for Disrupting trafficking in human beings". The meeting took place on November 7 and 8, 2023, at CERTH’s premises in Thessaloniki, Greece. VANGUARD is a three-year project, funded by the European Union within the framework of the Horizon Europe program and aims to strengthen the fight against trafficking in human beings (THB), at the nexus of advanced technological solutions, understanding, awareness raising, and training to disrupt the trafficking chain (online and offline) at an early stage and address the culture of impunity. Moreover, Vanguard project aims to…

On November 8, 2023, the Information Technologies Institute (ITI) of Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH) was honored to host the General Secretary of the General Secretariat for Research & Innovation (GSRI), Athanasios Kyriazis. A key highlight of Kyriazis's visit was a comprehensive demonstration of a groundbreaking remote surveillance system for an autonomous swarm of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with enhanced cognitive capabilities.   [caption id="attachment_5784" align="aligncenter" width="642"] P.1 Dr. Yiannis Kompatsiaris, Dr. Stefanos Vrochidis, Athanasios Kyriazis (from the left) [/caption]   These technologies included are a collaborative innovation by M4D Group and ConvCAO Group. The demonstration marked a milestone for ITI's extended involvement and expertise in surveillance-related projects.   [caption id="attachment_5785" align="aligncenter" width="617"] P.2 Demonstration of the Remote-Control Center of the UAV Surveillance system[/caption]   The operator has…

Cyber Threat intelligence The M4D Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) tool enables the collection, storage, analysis, correlation, and sharing of information about threats and vulnerabilities from both internal and external sources; such information is identified and analysed using AI technologies in order to extract knowledge regarding attackers and any other abnormal behaviour. Internal sources comprise honeypot instances, firewalls, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) and more. External sources include among others vulnerability databases, CERT feeds, databases with Proof-of-Concept (PoC) exploits, social media platforms, as well as various sources from both Surface and Dark Web. Using rule-based and machine learning-based analysis techniques CTI is extracted. For example, machine learning-based techniques, such as pattern identification and anomaly detection, can extract valuable CTI from the collected data. Finally, CTI is…

The Coordinator of TESTUDO, CERTH / ITI / M4D group, together with the Visual Computing Lab (VCL), has organised the inauguration of this Horizon Europe (HE) Innovation Action (IA) project at its premises in Thessaloniki! The project entitled as ‘Autonomous Swarm of Heterogeneous resource in infrastructure protection via threat prediction and prevention -TESTUDO’ engages a total of 20 partner Organisations from 10 EU and 2 non-EU countries. In this context, TESTUDO project aims to respond to threats that currently impact the safety of critical infrastructures in European societies, by contributing to the secure provision and utilisation of essential public goods, such as water, electricity, energy, and transportation. The kick-off meeting was attended by European Commission representatives who welcomed the partners and presented useful information about the European Research Executive Agency's…

Το M4D, ως συντονιστής του έργου «ΧΡΩΜΑΤΑ», βρέθηκε στις εγκαταστάσεις της 87ης Διεθνούς Έκθεσης Θεσσαλονίκης (ΔΕΘ) απο τις 9 έως τις 17 Σεπτεμβρίου 2023. Η ομάδα M4D, σε συνεργασία με άλλους εκπροσώπους του Ινστιτούτου Τεχνολογιών Πληροφορικής και Επικοινωνιών (ΙΠΤΗΛ) του Εθνικού Κέντρου Έρευνας και Τεχνολογικής Ανάπτυξης (ΕΚΕΤΑ), είχε παρουσία στο περίπτερο 7, μαζί με το Υπουργείο Ανάπτυξης και τη Γενική Γραμματεία Έρευνας και Καινοτομίας (ΓΓΕΚ) σε 3, συνολικά, περίπτερα. Ανάμεσα σε χιλιάδες επισκέπτες, το περίπτερο 7 υποδέχθηκε τον υφυπουργό Εσωτερικών (Μακεδονίας – Θράκης), κ. Στάθη Κωνσταντινίδη. Ο υφυπουργός, αφού εκδήλωσε ενδιαφέρον για την ψηφιοποίηση των κτιρίων, έζησε την εμπειρία εικονικής πραγματικότητας (ΕΠ) του έργου «ΧΡΩΜΑΤΑ». Ο σκοπός του εν λόγω έργου είναι η δημιουργία νέων εργαλείων για την ψηφιοποίηση της άυλης πολιτιστικής κληρονομιάς, συγκεκριμένα μέσω της ανάπτυξης της αντίστοιχης πλατφόρμας,…

Special Issue "Image Processing and Computer Vision Sensing Technologies in Engineering Applications and Digital Twins" is now open for submissions! M4D director, Dr. Stefanos Vrochidis, and members, Dr. Konstantinos Ioannidis and Dr. Nikolaos Dourvas, act as Leading Guest Editors of a Special Issue entitled “Image Processing and Computer Vision Sensing Technologies in Engineering Applications and Digital Twins” under the scope of Journal MDPI “Sensors” to explore recent advances in Optronics Sensing focusing in the Digital Twin domain. The issue forms part of the "Sensing and Imaging" section of the Journal and aims to gather novel contributions that will explore their validity and applicability for a Digital Twin for visual data, independently of the application at hand (e.g., maintenance, construction, surveillance).   In this context, M4D invites authors with expertise in…

M4D welcomed the partners of ALAMEDA project - Bridging the Early Diagnosis and Treatment Gab of Brain Diseases via Smart, Connected, Proactive and Evidence-based Technological Interventions at CERTH’s premises in Thessaloniki for the project’s 6th Plenary Meeting between the 29th to the 30th of June 2023. The M4D team involved presented the relevant progress and achievements for the Data Analytics, Machine Learning, Deep Learning task. Specifically, we presented various predictive models on wearable sensor data developed and tested within the ALAMEDA project for brain disease diagnostics. During the presentation a brief introduction of the models and their main features were described along with the extracted results. One of the main achievements was the Ince-PD model optimization which now exhibits better results for PDQ-8 prediction. In addition, in the MS case…

M4D coordinates, on behalf of ITI-CERTH, the implementation of another HE RIA project called ‘Evidence-based Participatory Decision Making  for Cancer Prevention through implementation research - ONCODIR’, which kicked-off at CERTH on the 12th of June 2023! The Consortium, consisting of 27 partners from 9 countries, aims to address the challenge of Colorectal cancer (CRC) through interdisciplinary co-creation activities, and by adopting risk-based stratification tools for citizens, integrated decision support tools for clinicians, and intelligent monitoring tools for policy makers.     In the following three and a half years the partners will design a framework to aid the formulation of a National Cancer Plan via decision support theories that deliver evidence-based cancer prevention programmes, as well as AI-powered multi-omics, retrospective data analytics, and Innovative AI-powered personalised prevention approaches, that can…

M4D on behalf of ITI-CERTH, has successfully co-organized one of the most large-scale International Security and Defence Conferences, the Research and Innovation Security Europe - Systems & Demonstrations Conference (RISE SD 2023)! The valuable outcomes of the Conference, which took place in the Greek island of Rhodes between the 29th to the 31st of May 2023, have been achieved under the high-level synergy of 37 EU funded projects. While some of the main topics of the Conference included the subject of Disaster-Resilient Society for Europe, the Effective management of E.U. external borders, the Enhancement of EU defence, and Cybersecurity infrastructure, the event speakers as well as the attendees participated in live demonstrations that brought them forward to experiencing the advancement of technological solutions! Multimodal Data Fusion and Analytics Group (M4D),…

​M4D participates at the editorial committee of the Special Issue and is represented by Dr. Sotiris Diplaris and Dr. Stefanos Vrochidis. This Special Issue aims to investigate the future trends of AI and big data, as well as their influence on various domains. Extended reality, art and culture, multimodal analysis, and multimedia retrieval are just a few of the areas that will be explored. We welcome original research papers and review articles that delve into topics such as edge computing, personalized medicine, ethics and the responsible use of AI, and natural language understanding, among others. We encourage researchers, scholars, and practitioners to submit their contributions and share their insights to enhance our understanding of the impact of AI and big data on society. Topics of interest include, but are not…

M4D participates at the editorial committee of the Topic and is represented by Dr. Stefanos Vrochidis. The topic of Disaster and Crisis Management applications to the open access publishing platform, MDPI. This topic includes five different MDPI journals, while authors can submit manuscripts to any journal participating in the Topic, and select the publishing conditions. The topic calls for papers that cover aspects relevant to the technological developments in various fields, such as ➢ IoT, ➢ edge computing, ➢ digital twins, ➢ machine learning, ➢ computer vision, ➢ embedded systems, and ➢ integrated sensors for hazard monitoring, forecasting and prediction. The submitted papers can address the challenges associated with disaster risk assessment, as well as to communication and preparedness activities, systems, and processes which enable individuals, communities, governments, and businesses…

The first Joint Dissemination Workshop ‘EU Fire Projects United’ took place online on the 23rd of January 2023 and was hosted by Firelogue. Among the invited Dissemination managers, M4D represented ‘Structured Approaches for Forest fire Emergencies in Resilient Societies - SAFERS’ project, as the Scientific Dissemination leader of the project, in cooperation with SEMIDE. The Workshop gathered 69 participants from nine projects, namely SAFERS, Fire-RES, SILVANUS, TREEADS, FireEUrisk, FIRElinks, FIRE-IN, PYROLIFE, and FIREADAPT, and focused on the current challenges and solutions developed in the field of disaster management. The SAFERS’s mission to support societies in becoming more resilient across the key phases of the forests’ fires emergency management cycle was presented as a whole by combining the common dissemination strategies that CERTH follows together with SEMIDE, the Communication and Stakeholders…

Can the citizens of your country use privacy preserving technologies that are compliant with GDPR purposes? The M4D Group of CERTH leads such a mission in order to offer the development tools for the processing of sensitive data, under the HE RIA project ‘A scalable and practical privacy-preserving framework - ENCRYPT’. In close collaboration with other 13 partners, M4D develops advanced data processing techniques which are required for the proper application of the Privacy-Preserving Technologies (PPTs) and the User Interface (UI). Acting as a Use Case provider, M4D offers the necessary tools for the extraction of Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) from the available data, as well as for the correlation, enrichment and sharing of the extracted CTI. Follow us on Linkedin to find out more: https://www.linkedin.com/company/m4d-group/, and visit the ENCRYPT’s…

The first dedicated online training focused on cyber exercises for Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CERTs/CSIRTs) and supported by innovative CTI technologies is about to become a reality! These CTI technologies, developed by M4D, the participating group of ITI - CERTH, are foreseen under the H2020 IA project ‘artificial Intelligence threat Reporting and Incident response System - IRIS’! Indeed, M4D Group, collaboratively with other 18 partners, aims to protect critical infrastructures and systems against cross-border AI and IoT threats in a three-year project. Investing in technologies that can support the creation of dynamic repositories related to threats and vulnerabilities which target IoT and AI-driven ICT systems, will enrich this information with the use of taxonomies and ontologies. What is more than that, the employed taxonomies and ontologies will be based…

M4D on behalf of CERTH/ITI has officially welcomed the inauguration of the HE RIA project, Holistic framework for the MatUrity evaLuaTIon of ReAdiness level for security TEchnologies - MultiRATE at its premises in Thessaloniki, as the Coordinator of the project! The project will be running in 9 EU Member States and 1 European country, by 12 partners. The Consortium invites you, in this context, to learn more about the development of a harmonised RL evolution methodology for security related solutions. The upcoming months will offer the opportunity to stakeholders to stay informed on how the open-access developed solution will be tested in multiple domains, such as in Cybersecurity, Border Management, and Fight against Crime and Terrorism.

The research paper entitled ‘Vehicle Color Identification Framework using Pixel-level color Estimation from Segmentation Masks of Car Parts’ wins the Best Session Award Certificate under the category Image and Video Processing for Smart City and Smart Environments! The research was conducted by M4D, the Multimodal Data Fusion and Analytics Group, as part of the Multimedia Knowledge and Social Media Analytics Laboratory, and was presented by Mr. Stavrothanasopoulos during the Image Processing Applications and Systems (IPAS’22) conference in Genova between the 5th to the 7th of December 2022.

  Four EU projects, namely CALLISTO (where M4D/MKLab is the Scientific & Technical Manager), CENTURION, DeepCube and Global Earth Monitor (GEM), funded under the Horizon 2020 call DT-SPACE-25-EO-2020 are inviting any interested parties to their joint event with the title: “Supporting Copernicus through Big data and Artificial Intelligence”. The event will take place within EU Space Week 2022 on October 6th, at 13:30-15:00 CEST at Hall C of the Prague Expo. EU Space Week is the go-to event for Europe’s space community and this year it will be realised on October 3rd-6th in Prague, Czech Republic. EU Space Week is jointly organised by the European Commission and the EU Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA) in collaboration with the Czech Presidency of the Council and the City of Prague. It…

  M4D/MKLab in cooperation with the Eastern Alps River Basin District invites you to the “DisasterMM: Multimedia Analysis of Disaster-Related Social Media Data” task at MediaEval 2022, a multimedia evaluation benchmark that is dedicated to evaluating new algorithms for multimedia access and retrieval. The DisasterMM task concerns the multimedia analysis of social media data, specifically posts from the popular platform of Twitter, that relate to natural or manmade disasters; this year, in particular, the disaster of floods. The participants of this task are provided with a set of Tweet IDs in order to download textual as well as visual information and other metadata of tweets that have been selected with keyword-based search that involved words/phrases about flood. DisasterMM includes two subtasks: Relevance Classification of Twitter Posts (RCTP): participants are asked to…

We are delighted to announce that the H2020 project NESTOR, received the second prize in the Digital Governance Awards 2022 in the thematic: Citizen Security, organized by the Greek Ministry of Digital Governance. Τhe aim of the competition was to highlight effective, innovative and pioneering digitization processes, while simplifying administrative procedures, and develop actions that support the digital transformation of the Greek state. M4D group, as the Scientific and Technical manager of the project, is responsible for the management and supervision of the scientific and technical outcomes of the NESTOR project. In addition, as a technology provider, the team will develop and integrate services for surveillance objectives in various domains.

“Earthquakes: From Twitter Detection to EO Data Processing” – New joint publication as an outcome of the EOPEN-BETTER synergy The “H2020 Earth Observation Big Data Hackathon”, co-organised by five now completed EU Horizon 2020 projects in the “EO Big Data Shift” topic, sparked the synergy between EOPEN and BETTER, and in particular between CERTH’s M4D/MKLab, ETH’s Department of Earth Sciences, Elecnor Deimos and Terradue Srl. This successful collaboration was captured with the recent publication of a joint article titled “Earthquakes: From Twitter Detection to EO Data Processing” in IEEE’s Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters. The paper presents a pipeline that uses Twitter data to identify locations of earthquakes and uses the information to trigger EO data analysis. The pipeline as well as the use of social media in the population…

Athens, 3rd of December,2021 Press Release Cut The Cord EU project Kickoff meeting On November 26th, the kick-off meeting of the project Cut the Cord (CTC) took place online, due to COVID-19 pandemic. The CTC project is an EU-funded Project (GA 101036276, Call: ISFP-2020-AG-TERFIN), with duration 24 months (11/2021 – 10/2023). The project’s consortium is consisted of ten partners, from six Member States (Greece, Italy, Romania, Germany, Sweden and Luxemburg), including Research Centers, Law Enforcement Agencies and SMEs across Europe. [caption id="attachment_2594" align="aligncenter" width="822"] The CTC Project Consortium[/caption]   The main goal of CTC project is to improve the investigation capabilities of Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs), through training programs and innovative tools, in an endeavor to assist their mission for preventing and tackling Terrorism Financing (TERFIN). In particular, the project…

Thessaloniki, January 10, 2022 Artificial Intelligence Threat Reporting & Incidence report system   A new EU project has come to protect ICT systems providing collaborative-first approach and state-of-the-art technology IRIS EU project, which consists of 19 partners from 12 European countries, officially launched its activities with the organisation of the consortium kick-off meeting that was held virtually, in September 2021. As existing and emerging smart cities continue to expand their IoT and AI-enabled platforms, novel and complex dimensions to the threat intelligence landscape are introduced. These, are linked with identifying, responding and sharing data related to attack vectors, based on emerging IoT and AI technologies, whose architecture and behaviour are not currently well understood by security practitioners, such as CERTs and CSIRTs. This lack of experience as well as of…

How can the dialogue between art, science and technology lead to a design process that makes our habitat (cities and nature) more inclusive, innovative, and creative? Join a Live Discussion at Garden Thessaloniki at Ars Electronica Festival 2021. In this session, invited artists, architects and researchers on AI from the Starts H2020 MindSpaces project (coordinated by M4D/MKLab) will present and discuss their exploration with these technologies and their creative practice at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, architecture and design. Art-Technology-Architecture (Live Discussion) Thursday, September 9, 2021 1:30 PM to 3:00 PM CET Learn more and register to watch it live at: https://ars.electronica.art/.../art-technology-architecture/

  M4D/MKLab in cooperation with the Eastern Alps River Basin District invites you to the “WaterMM: Water Quality in Social Multimedia” task at MediaEval 2021, a multimedia evaluation benchmark that is dedicated to evaluating new algorithms for multimedia access and retrieval. The WaterMM task deals with the analysis of social media posts from Twitter concerning issues of water quality, safety and security. Because the occurrence of words/phrases about the quality of drinking water (e.g., strange color, smell or taste, related illnesses, etc.) in a tweet might not necessarily reflect a case of water contamination, participants are asked to build a binary classification system that will be able to distinguish whether a post is relevant or not to water-quality issues. Participants can tackle the problem by using textual information, visual information,…

  As stated in the EC article, the beAWARE platform is much more than a crisis management platform to help authorities, first responders and citizens. It should rather be seen as a combination of relevant state-of-the-art technologies spread across different components and applications. It encompasses a protection and rescue service, it can be used for risk assessment (including scenario building), and it supports the core functions of call centres (public safety answering point or PSAP). beAWARE was a three year (2017-2019) project with 10 partners (practitioners, industries and academics). The consortium designed and developed an integrated decision support solution to provide crisis forecasting, early warnings, aggregated analysis and fusion of multimodal data, as well as management of the coordination between the first responders and the authorities. In the article below,…

M4D will actively participate to the Artificial Intelligence for Big Satellite Data workshop (Feb 25, 2021) with Dr. Stefanos Vrochidis giving a talk on “Multimodal fusion of EO and non-EO data for Big Data analytics” presenting the research of the group relevant to Artificial Intelligence and Earth Observation. Six leading Greek research institutions (including ITI-CERTH) join forces to showcase how Artificial Intelligence can unlock the potential of Big Earth Observation Data for socio-environmental good in AI4EO workshop on February 25th, 2021. Join us on our Workshop on AI for EO (25th of February 9:00-12:45 CET) to learn about: The main research trends and challenges in AI4EO, proposed by excellent European scientists The leading role of the Greek research community in addressing scientific questions with direct socio-environmental implications How Artificial Intelligence…

M4D/MKLab of the Information Technologies Institute of CERTH is contributing to the research and development of novel AI technologies for health as part of the consortium of ALAMEDA under the European’s Research and Innovation Programme Horizon 2020. ALAMEDA’s vision is to research and prototype the next generation of personalized AI healthcare support systems for people with brain diseases and disorders, specifically focusing on the needs of patients with Parkinson’s, Multiple Sclerosis and Stroke (PMSS). The project’s innovations will take advantage of new machine learning models, built upon lifestyle retrospective data as well as new streams of patient data that involve the monitoring of everyday activities, such as sleep behaviour and emotional status. M4D/MKLab will coordinate activities relevant to Artificial Intelligence approaches, aiming the reinvention of the modern healthcare in order…

M4D/MKLab of ITI-CERTH is delighted to participate in the newly launched, EU-funded H2020 project CALLISTO - “Copernicus Artificial Intelligence (AI) Services and data fusion with other distributed data sources and processing at the edge to support DIAS and HPC infrastructures”. M4D/MKLab has a significant role in CALLISTO, being the scientific and technical coordinator, as well as leading one Work Package and several tasks, including social media data collection, change detection on satellite and UAV images, data fusion, and information retrieval. The EU-funded H2020 project CALLISTO aims to bridge the gap between the DIAS providers and the users of the above-mentioned data through dedicated AI solutions that add value to the large volumes of satellite data frequently coming to Earth from the Copernicus Sentinel constellation. CALLISTO has the ambition to enable…

Journal: Sustainability Deadline: 31 May 2021 This special issue aims to publish high-quality research papers on the inter-disciplinary field of real-time water quality and quantity monitoring, flood mapping and risk assessment, using low-cost sensors, satellite images, UAVs, CCTVs, photonic technologies and community-based in-situ observations from social media and crowdsourcing platforms. Big data analytics aim to extract meaningful insights and patterns from very large and heterogeneous data sources in water resource monitoring. Multimodal data fusion aims to effectively combine data and information from the abovementioned technologies. Semantic technologies may also offer novel mitigation strategies through the enrichment of extracted knowledge, interlinking and reasoning for decision-making. Moreover, model-based and simulation-based approaches can be considered to optimize the operation and reduce the risk of an unforeseen event. Novel methodologies, frameworks and tools should…

M4D/MKLab coordinates the H2020 project i4Q on Industrial Data Services for Quality Control in Smart Manufacturing. The project had its Kick off Meeting on Tue. 19/01/2021 - Wed. 20/01/2021 and it aims at providing the industry with a complete solution that will consist of sustainable IoT-based Reliable Industrial Data Services (RIDS) which will be able to manage huge amounts of industrial data. This data will come from cost-effective, smart, and small-size interconnected factory devices and will be supported by i4Q throughout their complete flow, meaning from data collection to data analysis, simulation and prediction. In this way, the industry can aim towards zero-defect manufacturing and a smart and fully-digitized factory. i4Q involves 24 partners from 11 different European countries that bring to the table various expertise and experience in the…

Aiming to enhance the research activity in the field of oil spill detection, the Multimodal Data Fusion and Analytics Group (M4D) has developed the Oil Spill Detection Dataset, a dataset containing Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images depicting oil spills and other relevant instances. Current dataset is part of our research work presented in the paper entitled as “Oil spill identification from satellite images using deep neural networks” and could be beneficial for remote sensing applications mostly. The dataset is available to the research community through a specific access request  process. Currently, more than 50 institutions and organizations have utilized the Oil Spill Detection Dataset in research projects, which among of them are: Greenpeace UK – Development of an automatic oil spill detection tool based on SAR data with a web…

M4D/MKLAB announces the kick off of PathoCERT project that aims to the timely and precise identification of pathogen contamination events in areas that water is present in order to inform the first responders and warn the public. The project’s main mission is to ensure the quality of surface water. To this end, a unified solution will be adopted that combines (i) Remote sensing techniques applied on Satellite Data (ii) Artificial intelligence technologies paired with UAV material (iii) social media analysis on the most relative tweets (iv) early detection of threats to minimize any potential danger, detect incidents and most important to inform the first responders of any potential contaminations. The contamination of water systems with pathogens is a major public health issue in both developing and developed countries across the…

M4D/MKLAB is happy to announce the kick off of our exciting new project ISOLA aiming at fighting piracy, protect cruise lines on voyage, safeguard on board passengers and ensure that ships are well equipped to handle challenging situations. The project’s main mission is to optimize the security of cruise ships. This will be achieved with the adoption of a holistic solution that combines (i) AI and computer vision (ii) intelligent monitoring (iii) UAVs and chemical detectors  (iv) early detection of threats to minimize any potential danger, detect incidents, abate thefts and episodes due to alcohol or drugs consumption and last but not least effectively mitigate cyber security dangers. Cruise ships today can carry more than 5500 passengers and 2200 crew members for an average time of seven days per trip…

  A joint exercise will be supported by Fraunhofer IAIS (BETTER project) and M4D/MKLab ITI-CERTH (EOPEN project) in the final BETTER Hackathon. This step-by-step exercise will involve the conversion of Tweets to RDF for ingestion by SANSA for semantic geo-clustering and visualization. We invite students, software developers, data scientists, EO-developers, or anyone with interest in EO and semantic interoperability topics to participate. Date & Time:  29 October 1:30pm – 5:30pm CET Register for this exercise here

  M4D/MKLab in cooperation with the Alto Adriatico Water Authority (AAWA) is organizing the Flood-related Multimedia task at the MediaEval Multimedia Evaluation benchmark, an initiative that is dedicated to evaluating new algorithms for multimedia access and retrieval. The task requires participants to build an information retrieval system or a classifier that is able to distinguish whether or not a tweet is relevant to a flooding event in an area of interest, in order to support flood disaster management. Participants can tackle the challenge using text features, image features, or a combination of both. The dataset of the task, collected and annotated in the frame of H2020 beAWARE, H2020 EOPEN and H2020 aqua3S projects, consists of Italian-language tweets, motivated by the common flood events in the cities of the Eastern Alps partition in North-East Italy. Find…

  M4D/MKLab participates and contributes actively in the Security Research Rapid Response Platform (sec3r.com) and the efforts to combat COVID19 by developing a web-based application to monitor, analyse and visualise social media posts related to the Coronavirus pandemic. The Social Media Visualisation Tool (beaware-server.mklab.iti.gr:3000) collects tweets with the hashtags #covid19Italy and #covid19italia, focusing on the region of Italy. The advanced analytical processes enable to geo-localise the captured tweets, extract the visual content from their images as well as estimate their severity. The outcomes of the analysis are propagated and visualised to a user-friendly and interactive interface facilitating civil protection authorities and other stakeholders from the health sector to monitor and extract valuable and actionable information concerning the evolution of COVID19 outbreak. This in-house application is motivated by the basic ideas and aspects of various EU funded…

  We are proud to announce that our team, consisted of S. Andreadis, M. Mpakratsas, A. Moumtzidou, I. Gialampoukidis, S. Vrochidis and I. Kompatsiaris, has succeeded to place second out of thirteen teams in the first Copernicus Thessaloniki Hackathon! The hackathon was organized by Draxis environmental company and was held in Thessaloniki, Greece from 29/11 till 01/12/2019. Using the motto "Sustainable solutions for a sustainable way of living", the Copernicus Thessaloniki Hackathon invited participants to think and build a prototype using Space Data & Earth Observation Services. The MKLab team proposed a decision support system, named "Sack of Sand", which monitors floods by analysing satellite images and social media data. The idea, which was praised for its clear concept, and the live demonstration of a Web application developed during the Hackathon…