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Institute of Communication and Computer Systems of the National Technical University of Athens |
http://iccs.gr
The National Technical University of Athens, founded in 1837, is the oldest and the most prestigious technical university in Greece. It consists of seven departments, each one covering a different aspect of the engineering field. The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering has three Divisions – Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Power Engineering – which cover numerous research activities in areas such as Communication Networks, Digital Signal Processing, Expert Systems, Management of Information System, Microwave Communication, and other relevant fields. The major role lately granted to the Division of Computer Science in the R&D field is largely due to the evolution of the Telecommunications Laboratory, which is now the biggest group in ICCS in terms of staff volume and research activities. The Telecommunications Laboratory employs 20 scientists holding Ph.D. degrees in specific areas of information and communication technologies that supervise postgraduate research work of more than 100 highly qualified engineers. The group is entirely devoted to research activities and its members have extensive theoretical and computational experience in the fields of communication network design and management, protocol verification and simulation, OSI architecture, analysis and performance evaluation, software development, Internet applications, distributed database design and management, ISDN, IBCN, LANs, WANS, mobile and personal communications and other advanced research areas.
Since 1986 the Telecommunications Laboratory has been extensively involved in the RACE I and II, ESPRIT, BRITE EURAM, CTS, Telematics and ACTS programmes. In addition, the Laboratory has implemented several national scale projects and provided technical consulting and systems integration / development services, both to the private and public sector in Greece. Therefore the Telecommunications Laboratory serves as the transfer vehicle of the latest scientific advances into the local Greek market.
During the last years, the Telecommunications Laboratory has expanded its expertise and know-how in the field of Language Engineering through the development of electronic language resources, components and inventories as well as the development of complimentary technologies, especially on the Greek natural language. These resources and components are the most critical ones required for continued progress and include grammar, lingual ontology, lexicons and lexical semantics as well as mappings among the elements of all the above. Modern rule-based tools and technical skills are involved, such as analysis based on Finite State Transducers (FSTs) along with lexical, syntactic and semantic analysis. The whole effort is boosted by the vast evolution in signal and speech processing and the emergence of high computational speed systems (High Performance Computers) where NTUA’s Telecommunications Laboratory is already highly active. Ongoing projects cover both the areas of speech recognition and speech synthesis, such as Acoustics Modelling for the Greek Language (GRAM), the development of a Greek Text To Speech System (GRTTS), Language Modelling for the Greek language (GRLM), and Information Extraction from Structured Text (IEST). Moreover, a very significant role had been undertaken in MEMPHIS IST FP5 project, where ICCS provided its expertise in the area of mobile agents, general software development and language processing technologies. Finally, ICCS is very active in the framework of FP6 project with special emphasis on Grid technologies.
Prof. Theodora A. Varvarigou received the B. Tech degree from the National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece in 1988, the MS degrees in Electrical Engineering (1989) and in Computer Science (1991) from Stanford University, Stanford, California in 1989 and the Ph.D. degree from Stanford University as well in 1991. She worked at AT&T Bell Labs, Holmdel, New Jersey between 1991 and 1995. Between 1995 and 1997 she worked as an Assistant Professor at the Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece. Since 1997 she was elected as an Assistant Professor at the National Technical University of Athens, while currently she is an Associate Professor.
Prof. Varvarigou has great experience in the area of semantic wed technologies, media streaming and casting, scheduling over distributed platforms. In this area, she has published more than 150 papers in leading journals and conferences. She has participated and co-ordinated several EU funded projects, related to subject of the StarCast project such as POLYMNIA, MEMPHIS, MKBEEM, MARIDES, DELOS, SCHEMA, FIDIS, and so on.
Dr. Anastasios D. Doulamis received the Diploma degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 1995 with the highest honour and the PhD degree in electrical and computer engineering from NTUA in 2000. He joined the Image, Video and Multimedia Lab of NTUA in 1996 as research assistant, where now is a senior researcher in the ICCS/NTUA.
Dr. Doulamis was awarded as the Best Greek Student in the field of engineering in national level by the Technical chamber of Greece in 1995. In 1996, he was received the Best Graduate Thesis Award in the area of electrical engineering with A. Doulamis. During his studies he has also received several prizes and awards from the National Technical University of Athens, the National Scholarship Foundation and the Technical Chamber of Greece. In 1997, he was given the NTUA Medal as Best Young Engineer. Dr. Doulamis has a great experiment in image processing analysis based on artificial intelligent systems (such as neural networks, fuzzy logic, and evolutionary algorithms). In this area he has published more than 100 papers in leading journals and conference. He has participated in the ORESTEIA EU funded project dealing with intelligent technologies and MARIDES for decision support systems. He has also participated in the research activities of COST211 in the field of interactive multimedia services, and MPEG-4/7 activities.
Antonios Litke received the diploma from the Dept. of Computer Engineering and Informatics of the University of Patras, Greece in 1999. Currently, he is pursuing his PhD in the Telecommunication Laboratory of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (NTUA). Before joining the ICCS he has worked in the private sector as Telecom Software Engineer and has participated in numerous EU / National funded projects (such as NETGATE, SECRETS, LAMER, MEMPHIS, GRIA, HPC-EUROPA, AKOGRIMO, FIDIS, etc..). His research interests include Grid computing, resource management in heterogeneous systems, Web services and information engineering.
Role:
NTUA will be responsible for the creation of VR content for both test sites, and will oversee database development.
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IGD submitted a paper to the VAST2008 conference in Braga, Portugal in December ( http://www.vast2008.org ).The paper has been accepted.
The paper title is "Reality Filtering: A Visual Time Machine in Augmented Reality". Here is an abstract of the paper:
We present Reality Filtering, an application that makes it possible to visualize original content like drawings or paintings of buildings and frescos seamlessly superimposed on reality by using filtered augmented reality. This enables simple and inexpensive applications in the cultural heritage and architecture area.
The main idea is that the video stream showing the reality is filtered on the fly to acquire the same presentation style as the virtual objects.
This allows for a better integration of original historic content and creates the impression of a virtual time journey.
The registration of the virtual objects in the video images is provided by a robust 6DOF tracking framework based on two technologies that work in tandem: an initialization step based on Randomized Trees and a frame-to-frame tracking phase based on KLT. For the initialization, we present the novel concept of temporally distributed computational load (TDCL), which is able to automatically detect and register multiple objects while maintaining a constant video frame rate of 20 frames / sec.
For mid- to long-range augmentation a pure 2-dimensional tracking with 3DOF is applicable and leads to significant performance gain. The entire application runs in real time on Ultra Mobile PCs. |
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A paper related to the iTACITUS project has been presented by Michael Zoellner during the Stockholm eChallenges conference 23rd of October 2008. The title of the paper is "Encouraging Cultural Exploration: a Dynamic Tour Guide based on Personalised Contextual Information and Ad-hoc Planning" and the authors are: Jonah DEARLOVE, Maurizio MEGLIOLA, Silvana TOFFOLO, Michael ZOELLNER.
Download the paper
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Fraunhofer IGD showed an iTACITUS-based application in cooperation with Rome Reborn at SIGGRAPH 2008 in Los Angeles. The mobile application overlayed 3D models of roman monuments on floor-maps and posters at the booth in real time.  
See a video of the installation at Youtube!
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TXT presented a paper about the Progress Module used in iTacitus at the “EVA 2008" conference in Wien, Austria on Tuesday , 26 August 2008. The title of the paper is "Integrating Agent and Wireless Technologies for Location-based Services in Cultural Heritage", authors are Maurizio Megliola and Luca Barbieri. Download the paper
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We will be presenting iTacitus at “The Agenda for a sustainable and competitive European tourism” and centralised EU financial instruments supporting tourism in Portorož, Slovenia on Tuesday, 10 June 2008. |
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