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Athena Research Center took an active scientific and organizational role in Greeks in AI 2026, held on 15-17 July 2026 at the Eugenides Foundation in Athens, bringing together members of the Greek AI community from Greece and abroad. Athena researchers and affiliated members contributed to the organization of the event and participated in talks, thematic sessions and research presentations, highlighting different facets of contemporary research in Artificial Intelligence.

 

Athena Research Center also played a substantial role in the organization of Greeks in AI 2026. Maria Vakalopoulou, affiliated researcher at the Archimedes Research Unit, and Professor Evangelos Kanoulas served as the two General Chairs, while the Organizing Committee included Kostas Daniilidis, Director of Athena Research Center’s Robotics Institute and Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as Efstratios Gavves, Sotirios Tsaftaris and Maria Papadopouli, affiliated researchers at the Archimedes Research Unit. Dr Timos Sellis, Director and co-founder of the Archimedes Research Unit at Athena Research Center.

 

Marking the fourth anniversary of the Archimedes Research Unit, the first day of the symposium featured “An Evening with Archimedes”, an event dedicated to the experience, development and future of the Unit’s research ecosystem. Members of the Archimedes community, ranging from PhD students, fellows and early-career researchers to professors and senior scientists, exchanged experiences and perspectives on the Unit’s impact on their academic and professional trajectories, the links between research and industry, opportunities for the next generation of researchers, and the future development of Archimedes. Dr Timos Sellis, Director of the Archimedes Research Unit at Athena Research Center, also took part in the discussion.

 

The program continued with a talk by Christos H. Papadimitriou, Principal Scientist and co-founder of the Archimedes Research Unit at Athena Research Center and Donovan Family Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, entitled “Foundational Research in the Time of AI”, followed by the Archimedes Welcome Reception, where affiliated researchers of the Unit presented their research.

 

As part of the scientific program, Maria Papadopouli organized and participated in the thematic session “Neuroscience-Inspired AI (Neuro-AI): An Evolving Reciprocal Synergy Advancing Science and Technology”. The discussion brought together researchers from Artificial Intelligence, neuroscience, medicine and computational neuroscience, focusing on the reciprocal relationship between neuroscience and AI and on the opportunities arising from their convergence for advances in research and technology.

 

Dr Vassilis Katsouros, Director of the Institute for Language and Speech Processing at Athena Research Center, also contributed to the symposium’s thematic discussions, participating in the “Open Sovereign AI Models” session of the AI & Industry Workshop. The session focused on the development of open and sovereign AI models, bringing together representatives from the research, technology and industry communities.

 

Athena’s presence also extended to the symposium’s research program, with researchers and affiliated members presenting papers and posters. Among them, “VGGT-HPE: Reframing Head Pose Estimation as Relative Pose Prediction”, by Vasiliki Vasileiou, PhD candidate at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and affiliated researcher at the Archimedes Research Unit; Panagiotis Filntisis, postdoctoral researcher at Athena Research Center’s Institute of Robotics; Petros Maragos, Director and Scientific Coordinator of HERON - Hellenic Robotics Center of Excellence at Athena Research Center and Professor Emeritus at NTUA; and Kostas Daniilidis, Director of Athena Research Center’s Institute of Robotics and Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, was presented in a spotlight session and ranked third in the session vote. The work was supported by the Archimedes Research Unit and HERON.

 

During the symposium, the “Bodossaki Foundation - Greeks in AI Visiting Fellowship” was also awarded to Ioannis Kalogeropoulos, a PhD student and affiliated researcher at the Archimedes Research Unit. The fellowship will support a research visit to the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security in Germany.

 

Through its contribution to the organization, its scientific input and the participation of its researchers, Athena Research Center actively contributed to an event that seeks to strengthen synergies between the Greek and international AI communities, showcase research activity, and build new bridges between research and application.