The Information Technologies Institute (http://www.iti.gr), until recently known as Informatics and Telematics Institute, was founded in 1998 as a non-profit organisation under the auspices of the General Secretarial of Research and Technology of Greece (GSRT), with its head office located in Thessaloniki, Greece. Since 2000 it is a founding member of the Centre of Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH - http://www.certh.gr). CERTH-ITI’s related areas of R&D activities include: semantic multimedia analysis, multimedia indexing and retrieval, largescale and social media analysis, knowledge structures, personalization and knowledge discovery for the Semantic Web, etc. CERTH-ITI has participated in more than 80 EC IST and 85 National projects and subcontracts. Over the last eight years, the ITI research team has authored over 200 publications in scientific journals, 65 books and book chapters and over 500 presentations to international conferences. CERTH-ITI regularly participates in international benchmarking activities, such as TRECVID, and in 2011 had the top performance in the TRECVID interactive known-item video search task.
CERTH-ITI currently coordinates, among other projects, the FP7 ICT IP SocialSensor “Sensing User Generated Input for Improved Media Discovery and Experience”, and has leading roles in the FP7 ICT IP LinkedTV “Television Linked to the Web”, FP7 ICT IP GLOCAL “Event-based Retrieval of Networked Media”, and FP7 ICT STREP PESCaDO “Personalized Environmental Service Configuration and Delivery Orchestration”. It also participates in the EDA-funded project MEDUSA and in the audiovisual search engines Coordinated Action “CHORUS+”. In the past, CERTH-ITI coordinated or had leading roles in several IST-FP7 or FP6 IPs (WeKnowIt, aceMedia, MESH, XMedia), STREPs (JUMAS, VIDI-Video, BOEMIE) and NoEs (K-Space, Knowledge Web), and also lead the Greek national R&D Training Network MULTI-MINE. CERTH-ITI participates in standardization activities (e.g. MPEG, JPEG), and is active in the organization of scientific conferences, including the Joint ACM Workshop on Modeling and Representing Events (J-MRE'11), the 3rd ACM Workshop on Social Media (WSM’11), the 2nd ACM Workshop on Events in Multimedia (EiMM 2010), the 2nd ACM Workshop on Social Media (WSM 2010), the 2009 ACM Int. Conf. on Image and Video Retrieval (CIVR 2009), and others.
CERTH will take the role of the Research Manager in the project. CERTH will contribute to ForgetIT primarily in the area of multimedia information processing and analysis, most notably on the evaluation of multimedia similarity and redundancy, on semantic multimedia analysis for condensation, and on the development of condensation and consolidation methods based on media quality, diversity and coverage. CERTH will lead the related work package WP4 “Information Consolidation and Concentration”.
Dr. Vasileios Mezaris is a Senior Researcher (Researcher C’) with CERTH-ITI. His research interests include image and video analysis, content-based and semantic image and video retrieval, event detection in multimedia, medical image analysis. He is the co-author of 22 papers in refereed international journals, 7 book chapters, 2 patents, and more than 70 papers in international conferences. He regularly serves as reviewer of project proposals, reviewer of manuscripts submitted to various scientific journals, and organiser, program committee member or reviewer for various international conferences. In 2011, he was one of the General Chairs of the ACM Joint Workshop on Modeling and Representing Events at ACM Multimedia. He has participated in many European and National Projects, having leading roles in several of them. He is a Member of the IEEE. Since 2012, he is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia.
