CENTRE FOR RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY (CERTH-ITI)
THERMI, THESSALONIKI – GREECE
Brief Biography of Partner
The Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH) is one of the largest research centres in Greece. Its mission is to promote the triplet Research – Development – Innovation by conducting high quality scientific research and developing innovative products and services. CERTH is involved in strong and long term collaborations with research centres and universities in Greece and abroad, as well as with significant national and international partners in industry.
CERTH is essentially a self-supported Research Centre generating an average annual turnover of ~ € 22 Million coming from: >30% from bilateral industrial research contracts, >60% from competitive research projects, and <10% as government institutional funding. CERTH has received numerous awards and distinctions and is listed among the Top-20 of the EU’s Research Centres with the highest participation in HORIZON 2020 competitive research grants.
More than 700 people work at CERTH with the majority being scientists. Its latest achievement in the field of human resources is the “HR EXCELLENCE IN RESEARCH” logo awarded by the EC in April 2012 as a proof that CERTH is committed to offer the best possible working conditions, regardless the socioeconomic environment, and at the same time work towards the realisation of the European Research Area (Innovation Union, Commitment #4).
CERTH consists of five (5) Institutes and the Central Directorate and is governed by its Board of Directors. The institution that participates in order to fulfil the objectives of OPTIMAI is Information Technologies Institute (ITI), which was founded in 1998 and since 2000 is a founding member of the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH), which is supervised by the General Secretariat for Research and Technology (GSRT).
CERTH/ITI is one of the leading Institutions of Greece in the fields of Informatics, Telematics and Telecommunications. It is active in a large number of application sectors (energy, buildings and construction, health, manufacturing, robotics, (cyber)security, transport, smart cities, space, agri-food, marine and blue growth, water, etc.) and technology areas such as data and visual analytics, data mining, machine and deep learning, virtual and augmented reality, image processing, computer and cognitive vision, human computer interaction, IoT and communication technologies, navigation technologies, cloud and computing technologies, distributed ledger technologies (blockchain), (semantic) interoperability, system integration, mobile and web applications, hardware design and development, smart grid technologies and solutions and social media analysis.
CERTH/ITI has participated in a large amount of research projects funded by the European Commission and by Greek National Research Programmes and Consulting Subcontracts with the Private Sector (Industry). The last three years, the Information Technologies Institute has attracted an income of more than 25.5 M€ from National and European competitive R&D projects. For the last 10 years, the publication record of ITI includes many scientific publications in international journals, conferences books and book chapters, with a significant scientific impact. CERTH/ITI has a staff of 9 researchers, and more than 330 employees including research partners, fellows and assistants as well as administration and technical staff.
Partner’s Role in the OPTIMAI project
CERTH/ITI is the Project Coordinator overseeing the smooth progression of OPTIMAI and managing its
administrative aspects. From the technical perspective CERTH/ITI contributes, by transferring and advancing its expertise in quality control sensing and AI modelling as well as in distributed ledger technology. It also has a major role in the AI-based prediction of upcoming defects and the root cause analysis of production deficiencies. CERTH/ITI leads the development of computer vision techniques for the interaction of machine and operator that will be integrated in an AR environment. It will also drive development efforts aiming at a decision support framework for the early and proactive notification of end-users on defects and malfunction. Finally, will contribute in the demonstration of OPTIMAI platform as well as in its horizontal activities, namely exploitation and dissemination.