Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS)

BRIEF PARTNER PROFILE

The Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) is a non-profit private law body associated with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). ICCS was established in 1989 by the Ministry of Education of Greece in order to promote research and development activity in all diverse aspects of computer and telecommunications systems and their applications. Within Maas4EU the Information Management Unit (IMU) research group of ICCS will participate.

IMU (http://imu.ntua.gr) is a multi-disciplinary unit engaged in research and development activities in Information Technology Management. IMU is staffed with three faculty members, seven post-doctoral senior researchers and twelve researchers. The research activities of IMU focus on: recommender and personalization systems, information systems for behavioural change, social and service-oriented computing, collective intelligence, groupware and workflow systems. In terms of application domains IMU’s focus is on: intelligent transport and mobility systems, collaborative and social systems, digital enterprise systems and electronic governance systems. Since its establishment IMU has actively contributed in 35 research and development projects, of which five are currently active. Maas4EU will be instrumental in allowing IMU to transfer expertise and competencies in recommendation and personalization systems to the industry.

 

PROJECT INVOLVEMENT

ICCS is the lead on WP6, dynamic and personalized MaaS services, as well as two of its task T6.3 the personalized product selection and T6.4 the MaaS recommendations services. Research in this WP mainly covers innovative approaches for the provision of dynamic and personalized MaaS services involving the design and implementation of the Maas information personalization and recommendation services that incorporate elements of ICCS has significant contributions to WP2, where it leads T2.1 the state of the art update. Activities in this WP, which sets the ground for the whole MaaS4EU solution and the further developments in the project, mainly covers state of the art analysis, design of the MaaS living labs, elicitation of user requirements for both the mobility service providers and the end-users of the MaaS4EU application, the development of use cases for the novel MaaS ecosystem envisaged by MaaS4EU and the development of the MaaS reference architecture. Additionally, ICCS is also involved in WP4 where it  leads T4.3 user information model and WP7 the MaaS open platform. Finally, ICCS actively promotes and disseminates the results of Maas4EU (WP9) in the recommender systems community through the publication of project’s research results in international journals, workshops, conferences and books.

KEY PERSONNEL

Dr. Gregoris Mentzas (Male): is a full Professor of Information Management at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens and Director of IMU. He serves as Director of the division of Industrial Electric Devices and Decision Systems and during 2006-2009 served in the Board of Directors of ICCS. His area of expertise is information technology management and his research concerns knowledge management, semantic web and decision support in e-government and e-business settings. He has published 4 books and more than 200 papers in international peer-reviewed journals and conferences, has 2 best papers awards in the ICE and eGov conferences. He sits on the editorial board of five international journals and has served as (co-) Chair or Program Committee Member in more than 55 international conferences like WWW, ECAI, DEXA, AAAI Symposia, PRO-VE, IDT and ESWC among others. Gregoris has led or contributed in more than 40 international research and development projects conducted in collaboration with SAP, IBM, HP, Siemens, France Telecom, ATOS and other leading technology firms. Research carried out by his group has led to the establishment of three Internet technology companies. Research results in the form of open source software are currently, or have been in the past, used by various organisations and communities. He has acted as grant evaluator and/or external reviewer in information technology programs funded by donors such as the European Commission, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Austrian Science Fund and the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation. His experience includes twelve years of management consulting in corporate strategy and information systems strategy. He holds a Diploma Degree in Engineering (1984) and a Ph.D. in Operations Research and Information Systems (1988) both from NTUA. During 2006-2009 he served as member of the Board of Directors of the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems of NTUA.

Dr. Efthimios Bothos (Male): is a senior researcher at ICCS. He holds a PhD in social computing (2011), an MBA (2006) and a diploma degree in electrical and computer engineering (2003), all from the National Technical University of Athens. Before joining ICCS he has held R&D and management positions at Siemens AG, Nokia Siemens and Intracom SA. He has numerous (more than 30) publications in peer reviewed journals (including IEEE Intelligent Systems, IOS Intelligent Decision Technologies) and conferences (including the International Conference on Recommender Systems and the International Conference on Human Computer Interaction). During his time at ICCS he has been involved in research bids that resulted to grants of over 1M euros, while he has managed the work of ICCS in more than four collaborative research projects. His research interests focus on recommender systems, persuasive technologies and collective intelligence, among others. More specifically in the ITS projects PEACOX and OPTIMUM he has examined how personalization and recommendation technologies can be employed in multimodal route planners in order to support travellers’ decisions. The proposed approaches were extended with persuasive technologies that nudge travellers towards decisions that are environmentally friendly and lead to green transportation and lower car use. Moreover he has led work related to user requirements elicitation and the development of IT architectures. In the FP7 research project SYMPHONY he has applied design thinking to establish a novel IT framework to support policy modelling while during his time at Nokia he was leading the system architecture group and was responsible for the definition of requirements regarding large scale telecommunication networks and products.

Dr. Babis Magoutas (Male): is a senior researcher at the National Technical University of Athens. He holds a PhD in adaptive information systems (2010), an MBA in techno-economic systems (2006) and a diploma degree in electrical and computer engineering (2003), all from NTUA. During his studies he was awarded with two excellent performance scholarships from the Greek State Scholarships Foundation and the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation. His work focuses on personalization and recommender systems, persuasive recommender systems, situation awareness, semantic web, knowledge management systems and collective intelligence. He has participated in more than six EUfunded IST projects, in which he has cooperated with academic institutions such as German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), University of Karlsruhe, University of Leeds, Fraunhofer AIS, and industrial organisations like SAP AG, BOC, Hewlett-Packard Galway, CAS Software AG. Dr. Magoutas has published more than 28 papers in international peer-reviewed journals and conferences in the areas of personalization and adaptive systems, situation awareness, semantic web, information systems evaluation, and collective intelligence. One of his papers in the EGOV 2009 international conference received the “Best Paper Runner Up” award in the category “the most interdisciplinary and innovative research contribution”. He has been Program Committee Member in the DEXA Workshop on Information Systems for Situation Awareness and Situation Management and the International Workshop on Event-Driven Business Process Management, while he has reviewed manuscripts for the Internet Research Journal. He has also worked as a software engineer at Intracom SA.