Meet The Speakers
Stavros Bompolas is a researcher at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) of the Athena Research Center. He holds a PhD in Linguistics, specializing in Computational Dialectology, and previously conducted postdoctoral research at the Archimedes Unit of Athena RC. His research lies at the intersection of Natural Language Processing, dialectology, historical linguistics, dialectometry, and phylogenetics, with a particular focus on Modern Greek dialects. His current work focuses on the development of linguistic resources and infrastructures for dialectal varieties, as well as the development and evaluation of AI-based language technologies for low-resource language varieties. He has participated in several national and international research projects on Modern Greek dialects, language resources, and language technology, and his research has been published in international journals, edited volumes, and conference proceedings.
Stergios Chatzikyriakidis is Professor of Computational Linguistics at the Department of Philology, University of Crete, where he directs the Computational Linguistics and Language Technology Lab. He is also Head of Research at MuVeS AI and founder of SimasiaAI. His work lies at the intersection of NLP, formal semantics and type theory, the reasoning and evaluation of large language models, Computatonal Dialectology and low-resource varieties. He holds an MSc and a PhD from King’s College London.
Antonis Dimakis received his bachelor’s degree from the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, with specializations in the Foundations of Computer Science and Data and Knowledge Management. He has since been pursuing a PhD on Natural Language Processing at the same university and is a fellow at Archimedes Unit, Athena RC. He has experience working on low-resource languages, machine translation and evaluation.
Dimitris Galanis holds a Ph.D. in Natural Language Processing (Nov. 2006 – Feb. 2012, title: “Automatic Generation of Natural Language Summaries”), an M.Sc. in Computer Science and a B.Sc. in Informatics. All the aforementioned degrees were obtained in the Department of Informatics at Athens University of Economics and Business. He started working at Institute for Language and Speech Processing/ “Athena” R.C in April of 2013 as a collaborating Researcher / Software Engineer and from September 2019 he is an elected Researcher. He has participated in several research projects (CLARIN:EL, OpenMinTeD, ELRC-SHARE, ELG, Language Data Space etc.). Dimitris has published papers in prominent conferences and journals that are cited more than 5000 times (according to Google Scholar). His research interests focus on Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, LLMs, and Language Resource Infrastructures.
Basilis G. Gatos received his Electrical Engineering Diploma and Ph.D. degree in Optical Character Recognition Techniques from the Democritus University of Thrace, Greece. He currently serves as a Researcher at the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications of NCSR “Demokritos” in Athens, Greece, and is a co-founder of the spin-off companies AI4Doc and Astros Intelligence. His professional career spans leadership roles in R&D at Lambrakis Press Archives, Computer Logic S.A., and BSI S.A. With research interests focused on Image Processing, Document Image Analysis, OCR, and Pattern Recognition, Dr. Gatos has authored over 200 publications in international journals and conference proceedings and participated in numerous EU-funded research programs. A member of the Technical Chamber of Greece, he regularly serves on program committees for major international conferences (such as ICDAR, ICFHR, and DAS) and co-organized ICFHR 2014, DAS 2016, and ICDAR 2024 in Greece.
Katerina Gkirtzou is a Scientific Associate at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) at Athena R.C. She holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics from École Centrale Paris, where she investigated sparsity regularization and graph-based representation in medical imaging. She has participated in designing and building major European infrastructures for language resources — including CLARIN:EL, the European Language Grid and Language Data Space. Her current research focuses on grounding language technology in structured knowledge, with particular emphasis on modelling lexical and linguistic resources as Linked Data (OntoLex/LLOD), knowledge graphs and neuro-symbolic methods.
Vassilis Katsouros is Research Director at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) of the Athena Research Center (ATHENA RC) and Director of ILSP since June 2019. He received his M.Eng. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece, in 1992. In 1993 he obtained the M.Sc. with distinction in Communications and Signal Processing from Imperial College, University of London, UK and in 1997 he received his Ph.D. degree in Mathematical modelling and Stochastic Control from Imperial College. Since 1998 he has been working at the ILSP. He is member of the Board at Athena Research Center since 2017 and member of the Board at the Information Society S.A. since June 2019. He has coordinated several research and innovation projects at national and European frameworks. His research interests involve digital signal processing, statistics analysis, machine learning and artificial intelligence with applications in a wide variety of signals and data (document, voice, music, image, video, sensorial data, etc.) He also leads ILSP’s strategic initiative for Greek LLMs, including the development of Meltemi and Krikri, the first open LLMs designed to support and advance the Greek language in the AI era.
Dr. Stella Markantonatou holds an MA in Chemical Engineering (NTUA 1983), BA in Linguistics (NKUA 1988) and a PhD in Linguistics (University of Essex 1992). She is an Emeritus Research Director at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing/ATHENA RC and a Principal Researcher in the AI Unit Archimedes/ATHENA RC. Her expertise lies in NLP for under-resourced language varieties with a focus on Modern Greek dialects and idiomatic speech, in language resource development and in knowledge representation.
Alexandros Nousias is a Research Associate at the Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications of NCSR Demokritos, specialising in digital and AI law, governance, and ethics. He advises research organisations, corporates, and technology companies across both research and market-facing projects, and teaches AI ethics, law, and governance at postgraduate level in Greece. He promotes a shift from compliance as a minimum requirement to quality as the real foundation of trustworthy AI. He contributed to the “Blueprint for Greece’s AI Transformation” as Technical Consultant to the High-Level Advisory Committee on Artificial Intelligence to the Prime Minister. He is also involved in Pharos, the Greek AI Factory, focusing on compliance and governance. He also serves as Chair of the Greek JTC 21 Mirror Committee on European Harmonised Standards and is an IEEE CertifAIEd AI Ethics Lead Assessor.
Giorgos Paraskevopoulos (Member, IEEE) received the Dipl. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2016 and the Ph.D. degree in Machine Learning for Speech and Natural Language Processing in 2024, both from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). His doctoral research focused on cognitive-inspired machine learning methods for dimensionality reduction and cross-domain adaptation in resource-constrained environments. He is currently an Associate Researcher (Researcher Grade C) with the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) at the Athena Research Center, where he has been a scientific collaborator since 2020. His industry experience includes roles at Intracom Telecom (SDN/NFV cloud engineering), Behavioral Signals (emotion recognition and MLOps), and two research internships with Amazon: at Alexa AI (Lab126) focusing on multimodal speech recognition, and at AWS AI Labs focusing on multimodal video action recognition and summarization. Dr. Paraskevopoulos’s research focus is multimodal machine learning, with additional interests in large language model (LLM) development, contributing to the Greek LLM Meltemi and Llama-krikri. His current research interests focus on multimodal interpretability. He has authored numerous papers in peer-reviewed journals and international conferences, garnering over 100 citations (h-index 17). He serves as a reviewer for leading scientific venues and is a member of ISCA. Since 2024, he has also been a lead instructor and co-instructor for graduate courses in Speech Synthesis, Multimodal Dialogue Systems, and Deep Learning at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA).
Paraskevi Platanou is a PhD candidate at the Department of Informatics of the Athens University of Economics and Business and a fellow at Archimedes Unit, Athena RC, working at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, Digital Humanities, and written cultural heritage. Her research focuses on OCR/HTR, document image analysis, and pattern recognition for the study of ancient Greek papyri, manuscripts and inscriptions, with particular interests in low-resource learning, explainable AI, and computational palaeography. She holds degrees in Classical Philology and English Language and Literature, an MSc in Digital Methods for the Humanities, and an MA in Philology with a specialization in Papyrology and Classical Literature.
Kanella Pouli holds a BSc in Linguistics from the University of Athens and an MSc in Language Technology from the University of Athens and the National Technical University of Athens. She has been a Scientific Associate at ILSP/Athena RC since 2012 and has contributed to the following European and national projects: QTLaunchPad, CEF-ELRC, FutureTDM, ELRC+L2, CRACKER, ISD, CLARIN:EL, Apollonis, ELE, LDS, LLMs4EU, and AltEdic4EU. Her work focuses on the evaluation, usability, and continuous improvement of research infrastructures for language resources and technologies. As a research infrastructure specialist, she contributes to user-centred design, testing, and quality assurance. She also develops technical documentation and training materials and supports users through workshops, seminars, and training sessions.
Prokopis Prokopidis is a researcher and computational linguist at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) / Athena RC, where he has worked since 1998. He holds a degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Athens and an MA in Computational Linguistics from the University of Essex. He has participated in Greek and European projects focused on natural language processing, information extraction, and language resource development. He has contributed to the creation of annotated corpora, such as the Greek Dependency Treebank, as well as tools for automatic text annotation. His recent research includes named-entity recognition for archaeological texts, anonymization for court decisions, and the development of evaluation resources for Greek large language models. He has published in conferences, journals, and edited volumes.
Dimitris Roussis is a Scientific Associate and Data Scientist at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) of Athena Research Center, and co-founder of Layer42 Labs. He holds an MSc in Data Science and Information Technologies from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and an Integrated MEng in Civil Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens. His research focuses mainly on LLM training, including multilingual corpus creation, data processing, synthetic data generation, post-training, inference, and evaluation. He has been responsible for the data pipelines behind Meltemi and Krikri, the first open Greek LLMs, and has contributed to several other projects such as Pharos, LLMs4EU, SciLake, ELRC3. Additionally, he has worked on machine translation, parallel corpus construction, and language resource development. His work has been published in venues including EMNLP, EAMT, WMT, and LREC.
Sokratis Sofianopoulos received his Ph.D. from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens in 2010, in the field of Natural Language Processing. Since 2005 he has been a Research Associate at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing of Athena Research Center, working on machine translation, multilingual NLP and large language models. He has participated in more than twenty national and European research projects and is part of the team behind Meltemi and Llama-Krikri, the first open generative large language models for Greek, and designs applied AI systems for public organisations and companies. He also teaches Programming for Language Technology and Machine Translation in the M.Sc. in Language Technology at the University of Athens. Since 2017 he has been an adjunct lecturer at HAEC, teaching courses in machine learning, neural networks, NLP and others.
Vivian Stamou is an Associate Researcher at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) at Athena Research Center. She previously served as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Archimedes Unit of Athena Research Center. She holds a PhD in Computational Psycholinguistics from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and an MSc in Computational Linguistics from the University of Stuttgart. Her research interests include modeling low-resource languages, developing resources and models for offensive language detection and investigating the role of bias in language technologies.
Chara Tsoukala is a Research Associate at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) at Athena R.C. She holds an MSc in Human-Machine Communication from the University of Groningen and a PhD from Radboud University, where she investigated bilingual sentence production and code-switching through cognitive computational modeling. Her current research focuses on multilingual and low-resource language technologies, with particular emphasis on Automatic Speech Recognition for under-resourced languages, Natural Language Processing, and LLM-based agents and multi-agent systems.
Leon Voukoutis has been a scientific associate at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) of the Athena Research Centre (Athena RC) since April 2020. His work focuses on machine learning, NLP and language technologies, with particular emphasis on the development and evaluation of language resources, infrastructures and LLMs. He has contributed to the development of open Greek LLMs, including Meltemi, the first open Large Language Model for Greek, and Krikri.
