National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens was founded in 1837 and it is the oldest university in Greece. The Department of Informatics and Telecommunications has been active since 1986, and it is widely recognized as the top Computer Science department in Greece. The department has a long-standing tradition in research and teaching, and it is equipped with a number of contemporary research and teaching laboratories. It offers an excellent environment for undergraduate and postgraduate students (M.Sc. and Ph.D. levels). Many of the department faculty members are world leaders in their individual research areas, and have been awarded distinguished professional society fellowships (ACM, IEEE, EurAI among them), prizes and awards. Four junior and one senior faculty members have been awarded the prestigious ERC Starting Grant and ERC Advanced Grant by the European Research Council. Many of the department’s alumni have gone on to distinguished careers in industry and academia, in Greece, Europe and elsewhere. NKUA participates in Fair2Adapt with the AI team led by Prof. Manolis Koubarakis. The AI team works in the areas of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, and it has been a pioneer in applying AI technologies to Earth Observation in the last 15 years.
Role in the Project
NKUA works mainly in WP2 (Core FDO Infrastructure) where it leads Task 2.1 (Specification of community-specific metadata schemas and vocabularies) and Task 2.4 (Data and knowledge search and discovery services). Task 2.1 relies on the requirements gathering of Task 5.2 to FAIRify the metadata elements (like the description of variables) and controlled lists of terms as proposed by the domain experts in M4Ms needed to represent information in the CCA domain by publishing machine-readable metadata schemas in Data Type Registries. Task 2.4 extends the EarthQA2 engine developed by NKUA to create a search and discovery service for FDOs using natural language questions.