Organisation Profile
The Centre for Research and Technology-Hellas (CERTH), founded in 2000, is the only research centre in Northern Greece, and one of the largest in the country. CERTH has important scientific and technological achievements in many areas including: Energy, Environment, Industry, Mechatronics, Information & Communication, Transportation & Sustainable Mobility, Health, Agro-biotechnology, Smart farming, Safety & Security, as well as several cross-disciplinary scientific areas. Today CERTH includes the following five institutes with indicated major fields of research: (a) Chemical Process & Energy Resources Institute (CPERI), (b) Information Technologies Institute (ITI), (c) Hellenic Institute of Transport (HIT), (d) Institute of Applied Biosciences (INAB), (e) Institute for Research and Technology Thessaly (IRETETH). Out of those, CERTH participates in this project through ITI.
CERTH is essentially a self-supported Research Centre generating an average annual turnover of ~€ 25 million coming from: (a) >30% bilateral industrial research contracts, (b) >60% competitive research projects, (c) <10% as government institutional funding. More than 700 people work at CERTH, with the majority being scientists.
CERTH has received numerous awards and distinctions such as the European Descartes Prize, the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant, Microsoft International Contest Prize, the Trading Agents Competition Award and many more. It is listed among the Top-10 of the EU’s Research Centres in attracting competitive research grants. CERTH has participated successfully in more than 1,000 competitive research projects (with a total budget exceeding 423 M€ and involving more than 1,100 international partner organizations) financed by the European Union (EU), leading industries from the USA, Japan and Europe and the Greek Government via the General Secretariat of Research and Technology.
The participating team, namely the Multimedia Knowledge and Social Data Analytics Laboratory (MKLab), part of the Information Technologies Institute, has significant experience and scientific expertise on the technical aspects of the WeVerify project, namely the collection, indexing and mining of multimedia and social network data from heterogeneous Internet sources, with emphasis on cross-modal methods for image and video verification, as well as the development of sophisticated multimedia retrieval web applications and services.
More details on the research activities of the participating team are available online: http://mklab.iti.gr/
Role in the Project:
CERTH will contribute to the innovation activities of the project by: a) contributing to the design of the open platform (WP3), especially with respect to multimedia data collection, analysis and propagation; b) providing a multimedia verification framework based on computer vision (WP4), and contextual verification technologies for leveraging cross-modal information analysis (WP4). Additionally, the team will employ computer vision methods in order to support the tracking and the propagation of media content, and altered versions of it in social media (WP5). CERTH will also participate in all relevant horizontal project activities, i.e. project management (WP1), use case analysis, requirements definition (WP2), evaluation and pilot support (WP7), and dissemination and exploitation planning (WP8).