News

The President of the Board of Directors and Director General of Athena Research Center, Professor Ioannis Emiris, had a significant presence at the GenAI4Greece: Transforming the Public Sector conference, held in Athens on January 28, 2026. The event brought together leading representatives from the public administration and technology sectors to discuss the contribution of Artificial Intelligence to the transformation of public services.

 

The conference, co-organized by AWS and Logicom, focused on how cloud and Artificial Intelligence technologies can be leveraged to improve public sector operations and deliver more efficient, modern, and citizen-centered services.

 

Professor Emiris participated in the session titled “Discussion with Greek Public Sector leaders on digital transformation with AI”, moderated by Mr Pavlos Chatzidimitriou, Head of Public Sector at Amazon Web Services (AWS) for Greece, Cyprus, and Malta. The discussion also featured Professor Panos Louridas, Head of Research and Development at GRNET, and Mr Marios Dafnomilis, Strategic Foresight and Future Planning Advisor to the Presidency of the Greek Government.

 

During the discussion, participants highlighted the role of computing infrastructures and public-private partnerships in the development and deployment of advanced Artificial Intelligence technologies. The President of Athena Research Center noted that Greece ranks among the leading users of computing resources in Europe, with Athena playing a central role in this ecosystem. He also stressed the importance of large technology providers offering tools and expertise tailored to the needs of both the research community and businesses, with particular emphasis on small and medium-sized enterprises.

 

Professor Emiris further underlined the importance of commercializing research results, referring to flagship initiatives such as the AI Factory “PHAROS” and Digital Innovation Hubs, which are already strengthening the ability of Greek enterprises to adopt advanced digital technologies and Artificial Intelligence solutions. Particular emphasis was also placed on the role of spin-offs emerging from research institutions, with Athena Research Center being consistently among the most active organizations in this field.

 

In parallel, the conference also showcased Athena Research Center’s research activity in the area of large language models for the Greek language. George Paraskevopoulos, Associate Researcher at Athena’s Institute for Language and Speech Processing, presented the progress achieved in developing open Greek AI models such as Meltemi-7B and Llama-Krikri-8B, along with upcoming activities within the PHAROS project aimed at developing advanced language and multimodal models capable of document understanding and visual processing. The presentation concluded with the announcement of the new spin-off Layer42Labs, which leverages existing expertise to provide specialized AI solutions tailored to the needs of the Greek market.

 

Athena Research Center’s participation in GenAI4Greece confirms the pivotal role played by Greece’s research ecosystem in shaping the next phase of the country’s digital public sector transformation.