Meet the partners: Athena Research and Innovation Center

November 20, 2025
Meet the partners

Artificial Intelligence • GenAI • Explainable AI • Multi-Agent Systems • Explainable Multimodal Large Language Models • Context-Aware Systems •

Athena Research and Innovation Information Technologies

Athena Research and Innovation Center is a leading Greek organisation dedicated to Digital Sciences and Technologies. It operates through multiple specialised institutes, including:

Athena RC serves the full spectrum of the research lifecycle, from basic and applied research to system and product development, infrastructure services, and ultimately technology transfer and entrepreneurship. Its mission is to advance knowledge and develop innovative solutions and technologies that support the digital society. The organisation is known for its strong national and international presence, its skilled multidisciplinary research teams, and its extensive experience in managing and participating in EU-funded projects (e.g., Horizon Europe, Digital Europe, EuroHPC, etc.).

Why is Athena relevant to AIXPERT?

In the context of the AIXPERT project, Athena’s key areas of expertise that are directly relevant include:

Language Technologies, Human Communication and Content Technologies
(including NLP, LLMs, agentic AI systems, speech technologies, embodied interaction, and multimedia content processing)
Data Systems and Data Technologies
(such as web information systems, distributed systems, data privacy, interoperability, and digital resource curation)
Technologies for Industry, Sustainability and Security
(including industrial information systems, AI for manufacturing, modelling and automation, and enterprise integration)
Robot Perception and Interaction
(relevant for educational robotics and embodied AI use-cases within AIXPERT)

Meet the Team

Within AIXPERT, Athena plays a central role. It not only serves as the project coordinator, ensuring the quality of processes and outputs across all phases, but is also directly involved in key tasks such as project management, the system architecture blueprint, the virtual assistant, and the development of explainable Multimodal Foundation Models.

Haris Papageorgiou

Project Coordinator, Research Director

Bio

Haris Papageorgiou is the Deputy Head of the Natural Language and Knowledge Extraction Department and a senior researcher at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP/R.C. “Athena”), where he works on NLP and Language Applications. He holds a Diploma in Electrical Engineering (1992) from the National Technical University of Athens and a PhD (1996) in Information Technology from the NTUA also. From 1989 to 1992 he joined the Greek Eurotra team. Since 1992, he has been working for ILSP, involved in European projects in the area of multilingual multimodal multimedia processing (indicatively Eurotra, LRE/Translearn, Esprit-Naplus, LE-Aventinus, ΙST-CIMWOS, IST-Reveal_This, eBusiness-MUSE, COST278, ΗΕΓ-TV++, COST2102). He is teaching at the Postgraduate Programme of Studies “Technoglossia”. He has published more than 50 publications in international scientific books, journals and international conferences. He holds a patent in Machine Translation technology.

Chara Tsoukala

Coordination Team, Research Associate

Bio

Chara Tsoukala is a Research Associate at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) of the Athena Research Center (Athena RC). She holds an MSc in Human–Machine Communication from the University of Groningen and a PhD in Computational Psycholinguistics from Radboud University, where she developed computational cognitive models of bilingual sentence production and code-switching. She has participated in numerous national and European research projects. Her current research focuses on agentic (multi-agent) systems and on automatic speech recognition (ASR) for low-resourced languages.

Sotiris Kotitsas

ML & Natural Language Processing Engineer / Research Associate

Bio

Sotiris Kotitsas is a Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing Engineer, and a Research Associate at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) of the Athena Research Center (ATHENA RC), where he has been working since July 2019. He has extensive experience in Network Analysis, Data Science, Data Mining, and Natural Language Processing, with a focus on their practical and research applications.

He has participated in numerous European and national research projects, including IntelComp, UNBIASED, EOSC Future, ΚΡΗΠΙΣ, PathOS, JustREDI, LLMs4EU, SciLake etc. His research has been published in leading international conferences/journals such as ACL, EMNLP, EACL and Frontiers.

Sotiris holds a B.Sc. and an M.Sc. in Computer Science from the Athens University of Economics and Business, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, focusing on Scientific Discovery using Multi-Agentic Systems. At ILSP, he designs and develops language technology tools for Information Extraction and Knowledge Mining from heterogeneous data sources, leveraging state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning techniques. His recent work centers on Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multi-Agent Systems for advanced AI-driven scientific discovery.

Panos Griziotis

Natural Language Processing Engineer / Research Associate

Bio

Panos Griziotis is a Natural Language Processing Engineer and Research Associate at the Institute of Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) of the Athena Research Center (Athena ARC). He holds an MSc in Language Technology and a BSc in Linguistics from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA). His research interests include Conversational AI, Question Answering, and Information Retrieval. He contributes to several European research projects and has industry experience in AI-based applications for the detection of neurodegenerative diseases. His current work investigates multi-agent systems (MAS) and their potential to address complex real-world problems.

Olga Mavi

Research Associate

Bio

Olga Mavi is a Research Associate at the Institute of Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) of the Athena Research Center (Athena ARC), contributing to projects at the intersection of product innovation and technology strategy. Previously, as VP of Product at Kariera Group, Olga led the strategic vision and execution of the group’s global SaaS product portfolio in the HR tech space across Europe and Asia, managing a department of cross-functional teams including product management, product marketing and business intelligence. In her earlier role as Product Director eCommerce at Upstream, she managed the product side of the joint venture between Upstream and Socital, pioneering text marketing automation in the Brazilian eCommerce market. Olga also co-founded Socital, a SaaS platform for eCommerce companies to increase sales through conversion rate optimization, where she served as Head of Product for over five years. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Management Science and Technology from the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB). She is the co-organizer of Product Community Greece, connecting Product Managers across Greece and abroad. Olga has been a speaker and mentor in various events promoting women’s empowerment in the workplace, women in tech, entrepreneurship, and product management.

George Paraskevopoulos

Research Associate

Bio

George Paraskevopoulos is a Research Associate at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) / Athena RC, specializing in multimodal machine learning, language modeling, and speech processing. He received his PhD from NTUA (2024) and has held Applied Scientist internship positions at Amazon (Alexa Lab126 and AWS AI Labs). He is a member of the project team that developed the Greek Large Language Models, Meltemi and Llama-krikri. His research interests include multimodal machine learning, the training and utilization of large language and speech models, and model adaptation for low-resource speech recognition. His work has received over 1000 citations (h-index 15), and he serves as a reviewer for premier international conferences and journals. He is a member of IEEE and ISCA.

Stratos Kakalis

Machine Learning Engineer / AI Researcher

Bio

Stratos Kakalis is a Machine Learning Engineer with a strong passion for Artificial Intelligence, particularly Natural Language Processing, Agentic Systems, and Computer Vision. He has worked on projects ranging from computer vision applications to large-scale NLP pipelines, focusing on developing scalable and effective AI solutions. Stratos is also pursuing an M.Sc. in Data Science at the University of Athens and conducting research on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and multi-agent AI systems.