Tech Talks Central

Costas Spyropoulos, Director of Research at the Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications at NCSR “Demokritos” describes the many benefits of the IoT era, when we will have -in only a few years from now- several billions of connected devices all around us, offering terabytes of data and many, many new simple and complex services as an answer to our needs. Dr. Spyropoulos gives some examples of these services in tourism, health, culture, retail and other sectors but he also points out the existing problems in interoperability, privacy and security. He also talks about their research, at NCSR; their own IoT platform and services that use open standards in order to easily extend and foster broad use. Finally, he insists that the public has to be educated on IoT and for that reason, himself and his team participate in conferences to inform the audience and demonstrate best practices. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central.

Dr Athanassios Ganas is the Research Director for Active Tectonics, GPS, Geological Remote Sensing at the Institute of Geodynamics of the National Observatory of Athens. His research is focused on earthquakes and in understanding patterns and behaviour of earth’s cluster based on recording signals from satellites.They have also developed an open-data web platform called GSAC where someone can access geological data from Greece and other countries in the nearby region. He also shares some surprising outcomes and discoveries of their research not only in Greece (Lefkada) but also from the US (California), Chile and Italy. Based on GNSS technology and real-time data, Dr Ganas and his research team are able to estimate accurately an earthquake’s magnitude (in just 2 minutes) and run predictive models for location and time of tsunami attacks. Interviewed by Sakis Triantafyllakis for Tech Talks Central.

Dimitrios Niarchos, Director of Research at NCSR Demokritos, talks about his specialty - magnetic materials; a multibillion dollar industry with a very bright future and the effort to get to new materials with better properties, that open the way for new markets in the coming Age of Magnetic Materials. Dr Niarchos tells us that his lab in NCSR produces innovative and novel materials like permanent magnets containing less or no rare (and expensive) earths, and has already several breakthroughs to be proud of. They are also working on recording media, passing -in a short of mini revolution- from 2D to 3D recording and, finally, they are putting a lot of research on transformers for mobile devices, having already increased their efficiency to over 95% meaning a longer life for batteries and many benefits for the environment. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central.

Natalia Manola, Assoc. Researcher at Athens University and Athena Research Centre, guides us through the initiatives taken in the EU on open access for data, open source and facility sharing, that aim to ameliorate collaboration among scientists and researchers around the world, in spite of many and different faces of diversity. This initiative, through the Open Air e-infrastructure and other steps (including the implementation of a European open science cloud) funded by major European countries, is closely linked to innovation and it also offers much needed reach to industry and the public. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central.

Alceste Bonanos, a passionate astronomer and Assoc. Researcher at the National Observatory of Athens talks about two very interesting research projects realised by her team: the goal of the first one is to identify over a period of three years all variable stars ever observed by Hubble telescope and make a catalog of them; while the second (which is called Neliota and it is actually an ESA activity taking place at NOA) has to do with the observation and detection of the impacts of really small (with a mass less than 10 grams) objects (eg. debris, meteorites, comets etc.) hitting the surface of the Moon. For the implementation of this project, a rather outdated 1,2 m. telescope near Kiato, Greece, was recently upgraded and special instruments had to be developed. This project -only the 3rd of its kind in the world- will last until Nov ‘18. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central.

Dimitris Gavrilis, Senior Researcher at the Digital Curation Unit of the Institute of Information Systems at the Athena Research Centre, talks about digital libraries which is the design and development of knowledge management systems mostly for the humanities. Mopseus, their digital library software tool, which stores text, images, audio files etc. uses complex models with metadata to present information in a much smarter and useful way. Their MORe aggregator, is a flexible metadata aggregator that provides fast curation and enrichment services, like showing coordinates for a specific address or finding links to create semantic relations, amongst other things. The repository is constantly curated through automatic live services that run behind the scenes checking for data degradation, missing links, affiliations and other information. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Konstantinos Giannakopoulos is a Research Officer of the Laboratory of Electromicroscopy and Nanomaterials at the National Center for Scientific Research “Demokritos”. He talks about how technology is now developing, by what he and his peers are doing at the nano and atom scale, where they manipulate matter. Using the information about the composition and properties of materials he says is what has lead to the advanced materials behind everyday things we all enjoy. The technology behind your microphone, your screen, the processors and other elements that interconnect devices, so that we can take and see pretty pictures on a variety of devices, talk to each other remotely or seamlessly, watch a movie, is all the result of working and changing materials at the smallest level. Konstantinos talks about their EU funded project www.materialsfuture.eu where information on materials is available for free in 23 languages as well as, short films, educational games, lesson plans for schools and other cool stuff. Interviewed by Sakis Triantafyllakis for Tech Talks Central.

Drakoulis Yannoukakos, Director of Research at NCSR “Demokritos” and Director of the Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory, talks about hereditary ovarian and breast cancer. Their research involves hereditary factors that lead to cancer in very young women, between the ages of 30-35 and even younger. By analysing the family genome they’re trying to discover the molecular mutations that are responsible for the early onset of cancer, which although it could be blamed on environmental issues is not that often a cause in so young ages. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Ioannis Raptis, Senior Researcher at NCSR “Demokritos”, discusses food safety. He starts out by mentioning several dangerous food scandals like the horse meat in over 10M burgers, the 3K patients fallen sick by e-coli in food, and the tainted baby milk in China. He continues by pointing out the disadvantages of the time consuming methodology used now to analyse food in the lab. The Food Sniffer (www.foodsniffer.eu), developed by his team as a prototype, consists of the sensing chip, the analysis reader and a computer which could mean a tablet or mobile. It’s advantages are it’s very small and can run with a single battery making it easy to use for analysis in the field. After producing the prototype they’re now planning to include the detection of more pathogens and even more miniaturization to make it even more portable. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central.

Sakis Triantafyllakis interviews Dr. Elena Dascalaki, senior researcher at the Institute for Environmental Research and Sustainable Development of the National Observatory of Athens on the energy performance and environmental footprint of buildings. Dr. Dascalaki talks about her work at the Energy Conservation Group of the Institute where they study the behavior and energy performance of buildings, the challenges and the importance not only of developing new zero energy structures but also upgrading existing older buildings to have close to zero energy performance, a feat that is substantial especially considering the large amount of old structures all around Europe. Dr. Dascalaki tells us they were instrumental in helping develop the regulations for energy performance of buildings and says they are working on new strategies to upgrade and refurbish old buildings in Greece and Europe to meet the EU mandate that all residential buildings will have to be built or upgraded to be zero or near zero energy, relying solely on renewable sources by 2020. This project she says will be first implemented for all public buildings which will have to make the switch by 2019. Interviewed by Sakis Triantafyllakis for Tech Talks Central.