The Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH) is a state University established in 1925. Today, the main campus of AUTH extends over an area of 429 metric acres in the heart of the city. The number of enrolled students is about 67.000 in 42 departments and 12 faculties that cover the full range of scientific disciplines, some of which are unique in Greece. The teaching and research staff consists today of over 2,400 members, whereas the number of special technical and administrative personnel is about 2,000 persons. The structure of the University today, its range of activities and its size, make it the largest and most complex organization unit of higher education in Greece. AUTH has about 6,000 graduate students, offering 110 post graduate courses and 550 PhDs per year. During the last 12 years 4,500 projects were implemented by AUTH, in which over 10,000 University staff and external researchers have participated.The advanced facilities of the University can support any scientific activity. More specifically:
- The University library is one of the largest in the Balkans, with approximately two million titles in the central and school libraries. It is a subscriber to 3,800 periodicals from all over the world.
- AUTH has established a high performance data network which is continuously maintained and evolving. The network covers the whole university campus (and establishments outside the campus). All departments are connected through this network to other national and international networks and to the Internet. The advanced infrastructure which offers security and high functionality is able to support efficiently the research.
People
Prof. Yannis Manolopoulos was born in Thessaloniki, Greece in 1957. He received a 5-year Diploma Degree (1981) in Electrical Eng. and a Ph.D. (1986) in Computer Eng., both from the Aristotle Univ. of Thessaloniki. Currently, he is Professor and Head of the Department of Informatics of the latter university. Also, he is appointed President of the University of Western Macedonia. He has been with the Computer Science Departments of the Univ. of Toronto, the Univ. of Maryland at College Park and the University of Cyprus. He has published over 270 papers in refereed scientific journals and conference proceedings and received over 3000 citations. He has supervised 16 Ph.D. graduates. He is co-author of the following books: “Advanced Database Indexing” and “Advanced Signature Indexing for Multimedia and Web Applications” by Kluwer, as well as “Nearest Neighbor Search: a Database Perspective” and “R-trees: Theory and Applications” by Springer. He served/serves as one of the main organizers of the 8th National Computer Conference (2001), the 6th ADBIS Conference (2002) the 5th WDAS Workshop (2003), the 8th SSTD Symposium (2003), the 1st Balkan Conference in Informatics (2003), the 16th SSDBM Conference (2004), the 8th ICEIS Conference (2006), the 10th ADBIS Conference (2006), the 5th Hellenic Data Management Symposium (2006), the Minitrack on Indexing, Access Methods, Data Structures of the 23rd ICDE Conference (2007), the 10th EANN Conference (2007), the 5th IFIP AIAI Conference (2009), the 4th Balkan Conference on Informatics (2009) and the 20th ICANN Conference (2010). His research interests include databases, data mining, Web and Geographical Information Systems, and informetrics.
Vangelis Banos holds a B.S. in Information and Communication Systems Engineering at the University of the Aegean, and a Masters Degree in Information Systems at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. His research interests include data mining, machine learning, semantic web, open access and digital libraries. In the past, Evangelos worked as a software engineer at Dataways S.A. and as an information systems manager at the University of Macedonia Library and Information Centre. Since 2002, Evangelos is pursuing the development of enterprise web applications, digital repositories and e-commerce solutions. Currently, he is part of the European Local project team in Greece. He is fluent in English and conversational in Spanish. Evangelos will be the Project Manager of BlogForever.
Ioannis Tselepidis holds a Masters Degree in Artificial Intelligence at KUL (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium), a Masters Degree in Business Information management at VUB (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium), an MBA at VUB, and a B.Sc. Degree in Business Administration from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. In the past Ioannis worked in various European Commission Projects for 8.5 years in various IT related positions (Software Developer, Analyst, Project Manager). He also has more than 12 years experience in software development in the private sector, working for leading global companies such as DHL, or as a free-lancer for various clients. He is fluent in English and has a working knowledge of French. Ioannis will work in the project supervising development activities of the partnership, ensuring the quality of the produced results. Ioannis will work in close cooperation with Evangelos to coordinate all technical issues of the project.
