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Athena Research and Innovation Center

Αθηνά - Ερευνητικό Κέντρο Καινοτομίας στις Τεχνολογίες της Πληροφορίας, των Επικοινωνιών και της Γνώσης

Mission

“The mission of ATHENA is to conduct outstanding research in Informatics and Computational Sciences and to ensure this research has an impact on society, tackling global challenges and addressing local needs. Athena RC studies a broad spectrum of research issues within these fields, including some raised by other sciences, industrial applications, or societal challenges.”

ATHENA is highly committed to homogenizing national and institutional policies, infrastructures and practices according to European standards and the EOSC. ATHENA’s strong presence and contribution in EOSC (e.g. through EOSCpilot, RDA Europe 4.0, e-InfraCentral, EOSC Secretariat, NI4OS-Europe, NEANIAS, OpenAIRE NEXUS, EOSC FUTURE projects) fosters EOSC realization and uptake. National projects, such as HELIX for the development of the Hellenic Data Service, co-coordinated by ATHENA, integrate Open Science and EOSC in the national research ecosystem.

Contribution to Open Science

ATHENA is one of the distinguished research centers in Greece, with a competitive position in the framework programs of the European Commission. Research that is being carried out and innovation that is being developed in ATHENA focuses on the fields of Information and Communication Technologiesfrom the perspective of both Computer Science and Computational Sciences, covering all software and hardware aspects. ATHENA’s knowledge and experience is diffused within and enhanced byits three Institutes (Language and Speech Processing, Industrial Systems Institute, Information Management Systems Institute) and five Units (Corallia - Hellenic Technologie ClusterInitiative, Space Programmes, Robot Perception and Interaction, Environmental and Networking Technologies and Applications, Pharma – Informatics, and Sustainable Development).

ATHENA is highly involved in Open Science and Research Data Management (RDM) both at the European and national level.  For the past decade, ATHENA  has been in the coordinating seat of OpenAIRE. Moreover, ATHENA collaborates with others to:

  1. develop services for domain specific infrastructures or generic / domain agnostic applications.
  2. support the adoption of policies for responsible and reproducible research and innovation at national and local levels.
  3. raise awareness and train researchers, librarians and relevant Greek stakeholders on digital skills for research.

Goals and objectives

ATHENA will continue work and pursue collaborations on policies, training and infrastructures/services for Open Science to address all legal, technical and operational challenges arisen andto effectively support the transition to the new model of scienceand the national EOSC implementation.Among the forthcoming goals of ATHENA is the establishment of the Hellenic Open Science Initiative (HOSI) with members of the bottom-up Task Force that published the collective proposal for a National Open Science Plan (parts of the proposal have since been absorbed in the "Bible of Digital Transformation" of the Ministry of Digital Governance) and their cooperation on institutional implementation.
  • Member since
    2010
Contact Info
Yannis Ioannidis
Affiliated Professor
Contact
Services
ATHENA has expertise in all areas of informatics, data science, robotics, automation, signal processing, artificial intelligence, networking and digital communication, and modelling. With this capacity, ATHENA participates in the development and maintenance of several European and national infrastructures for research, such as ELIXIR, Apollonis, OpenAIRE, HELIX etc. Services that are developed by ATHENA applymethods, including best practices and standards in research, data and software management, to enable for better workflows to be built and data activities to be performed in all or targeted scientific domains, boosting their quality and reproducibility of results.