Institute of Communication and Computer Systems

The Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) is a non-profit private law body associated with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), the oldest and most prestigious educational institution of Greece in the field of technology. ICCS was established in 1989 by the Ministry of Education of Greece in order to promote research and development activity in all diverse aspects of computer and telecommunications systems and their applications.

ICCS participates in Demo-net through its Information Management Unit (IMU). IMU is a multi-disciplinary Unit with a mission to enable the development of knowledge-driven organisations and its main focus it to design, develop and validate innovative models, methods and tools that leverage information and knowledge at the individual, team and organisational levels. The staff of IMU includes three faculty members, seven post-doctoral senior researchers and twelve researchers. Since its establishment IMU has actively contributed in twenty two (22) research and development projects, eight of which have been successfully completed during the 1997-2004 period and fourteen projects are active during the 2005-2008 period.

Since 2000 we have initiated an intelligent e-governance research programme. In this programme we develop and apply advanced information technologies to help government become more effective and responsive to citizens, while strengthening security and protecting privacy. Our vision is the “smart e-government”, i.e. a government which provides intelligent dynamic and interactive services to spatially and socially mobile citizens and businesses by fully exploiting knowledge management internally and by using semantically enriched, web-enabled technologies. The research challenges we address concern the semantic-enrichment of e-governance service architectures and the linking of effective organizational transformation to public administration, in order to guarantee increased participation of citizens and enable democratic processes.

In the field of e-participation we are researching on the development and evaluation of innovative social computing approaches such as knowledge and semantic technologies for e-participation, indeterminate information aggregation mechanisms to support deliberation, and social reputation and ranking algorithms for facilitating argumentation.

ICCS has contributed actively in the development of Demo-net’s research programme, especially in the knowledge and semantic technologies area. It also organised a workshop on Knowledge and Semantic Technologies for eParticipation (http://www.imu.iccs.gr/events/kmworkshop/).

• Mentzas, Gregoris

• Bothos, Efthimios
• Halaris, Christos
• Apostolou, Dimitris
• Magoutas, Babis
• Papadomichelaki, Xenia
• Vavyloni, Katerina
• Verginadis, Yiannis

• Community building / Collaborative Environments
• Deliberation
• Discourse