This talk discusses the research and innovation activities of Athena Research Center and through this presentation, offers general comments on the research landscape in Greece. Athena Research Center is a quite dynamic organization of medium size for Greek standards and the only such center dedicated to Information and Knowledge technologies. We outline current challenges, strengths and opportunities, focusing on the regional aspect and potential synergies in the domains of fundamental and applied research as well as technology transfer.

We include a sample of specific research results to show the range of Athena's activities and the different ways of conducting original research.

Ioannis Emiris is President and Director General of ATHENA Research & Innovation Center since April 2021. He obtained his BScE from Princeton University in 1989, and his MSc and PhD from UC Berkeley in 1991 and 1994, respectively, all in Computer Science. He has been Tenured researcher at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis (France) from 1995 to 2002 and an adjunct researcher since then. He joined the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens as full-time faculty in 2002 and since 2021 he is a part-time Professor. He has held visitor’s appointments at various institutions including Tsukuba ETL, Western U. (Ontario), ETH Zurich, USI Lugano, IHES Paris, Ecole des Ponts (Paris).

His research interests include Scientific Computing, Computational Geometry, Data Science, Bioinformatics and Robotics. He has been involved in more than 15 European research projects, of which he has coordinated 3, and in several national / bilateral projects. He has been adviser to 17 PhD and 8 Post-doctoral fellows and coordinated the MSc program on “Data science & Information technologies” (2018-21).

He is the author of one textbook on Computational Geometry, co-editor of two collections of chapters, and author of more than 140 journal articles and conference publications, of which two earned the Distinguished Paper Award at ACM International Symposium on Symbolic & Algebraic Computation (ISSAC). He served as Program Committee Chair of ISSAC 2011, General Co-chair of ISSAC 2020 and Local arrangements Chair of CG Week 2024.
He has been invited as a plenary speaker at several meetings such as ISSAC 2016, the German Discrete Math Symposium 2018, the Hausdorff Center School on Algorithmic Data Science 2022, and the Computer Algebra Term at Institut Poincare’, Paris 2023. He served on the Scientific Board of “Hellenic Foundation of Research and Innovation”, representing Mathematics and Informatics (2017-21), and is today chief scientist of a deep-tech startup.

This event contributes to the following United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: