NEWS

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…