We are fortunate to have a wide range of expertise and experience on the iRead project team. In a series of blog posts we will introduce each of our partners and find out what motivated them to get involved in the iRead project. Next up is the National Technical University of Athens (introduced by IVML Laboratory Research Director Dr Kostas Karpouzis).
Introducing National Technical University of Athens (NTUA)
NTUA is Greece’s oldest (founded in 1836) and most prestigious technological institution of Greece. It consists of nine engineering schools, covering the full spectrum of engineering fields. The iRead project will be carried out by 2 laboratories of NTUA: The Image, Video and Intelligent Multimedia Systems Lab (IVML) belonging to the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Algorithmic Applications and Logic Lab (AALL) belonging to the School of Applied Mathematical and Physical Sciences.
I am a Research Director at the Image, Video and Multimedia Laboratory. My current research interests lie in the areas of human computer interaction, emotion understanding, affective and natural interaction, and serious games. I am a co-editor of the ‘Humaine Handbook on Emotion research’ and the edited book on ‘Emotion in Games’ published in 2016, and a contributor to K. Scherer’s ‘Blueprint for an affectively competent agent’. I was also the technical manager of the FP7 Siren project, voted Best Learning Game in Europe in 2013 by the Serious Games Society.
Professor Antonios Symvonis is the iRead scientific coordinator and has been with NTUA where he is currently a Professor at the School of Applied Mathematics and Physical Sciences and Director of the AALL Laboratory. His research interests lie in the fields of design and analysis of algorithms, graph and network visualization, map labelling, social networks, and software development.
Professor Stefanos Kollias is currently the Director of the IVML Laboratory. Stefanos has led more than 100 European and national projects in the last decade, has co-authored more than 100 publications in scientific journals and over 200 presentations to international conferences.
Dr Crysanthi Raftopoulou completed all her studies at the School of Applied Mathematical and Physical Sciences of National Technical University of Athens. Her research interests include graph drawing and visualization, data mining in social media. She has an extensive experience as software developer and is currently working as a developer on the iRead project.
Why did we get involved in iRead?
Our involvement in the field of technology-enhanced learning started with the FP6 project Agent-Dysl, which produced profiling and learning resources, and supporting software for children with dyslexia, and FP7 ILearnRW, the predecessor of iRead, where the focus also included games and gamified activities. Our motivation regarding iRead is two-fold: we’re aiming to design and develop a functional, scalable, and extensible cloud-based system to host, process and deliver learning resources and material adapted to each particular learner, child or adult, and also develop an online adaptation system which takes into account user profile and usage history information to suggest learning activities and content to the learners and experts, integrating expert knowledge with teacher practices and learner preferences and choices. Having worked extensively on user modelling and profiling, we want to exploit domain and expert knowledge and machine learning techniques to assist the work of teachers and experts and also provide the learners with a more appealing and fun learning experience with games, eBooks and online learning resources.
iread-project.eu 