A High Level Advisory Committee for Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being established by decision of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, according to a press release from the prime minister’s press office
“The geometric progress of Artificial Intelligence makes it necessary to set up an Advisory Committee under the Prime Minister, with the main objective of preparing the country for the developments that all kinds of applications of this technology will bring, in the direction of participatory resilience, competitiveness, sustainable development and prosperity,” the announcement said.
“The Committee will provide evidence-backed advice and proposals on how Greece can take advantage of the multiple possibilities and opportunities arising from the use of IT, but also how it can implement a coherent framework of protection against potential challenges and adjustments, inequalities and the dangers involved,” it added.
More specifically, it pointed out that the Committee will formulate policy recommendations and outline guidelines for the long-term planning of a national strategy for IT, focusing on the fields of importance for Greece: economy and society, improving productivity, increasing innovation, strengthening infrastructure, managing the effects of the climate crisis, supporting human resources and social cohesion, creating quality jobs, defending national digital sovereignty and improving the operation of the State.
The CVs of the member of the Committee are:
Constantinos Daskalakis
Constantinos (aka “Costis” with an accent on ‘i’) Daskalakis is the Avanessians Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He holds a Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley. He works on Computation Theory and its interface with Game Theory, Economics, Probability Theory, Machine Learning and Statistics. He has resolved long-standing open problems about the computational complexity of Nash equilibrium, and the mathematical structure and computational complexity of multi-item auctions.
His current work focuses on multi-agent learning, high-dimensional statistics, learning from biased and dependent data, causal inference and econometrics. He has been honored with the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, the Kalai Prize from the Game Theory Society, the Sloan Fellowship in Computer Science, the SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize, the Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, the Simons Investigator Award, the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize from the International Mathematical Union, the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the Bodossaki Foundation Distinguished Young Scientists Award, the ACM SIGECOM Test of Time Award, and the FOCS 2022 Test of Time Award. He is an ACM fellow.
Kimon Drakopoulos
Kimon Drakopoulos the Robert R. Dockson Associate Professor in Business Administration at the Data Sciences and Operations department at USC Marshall School of Business. His research focuses on the operations of complex networked systems, social networks, stochastic modeling, game theory and information economics.
In 2020 he served as the Chief Data Scientist of the Greek National COVID-19 Scientific taskforce and a Data Science and Operations Advisor to the Greek Prime Minister. He has been awarded the Wagner Prize for Excellence in Applied Analytics and the Pierskalla Award for contributions to Healthcare Analytics
Vangelis Karkaletsis
Vangelis Karkaletsis is the Director at the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications of the NCSR “Demokritos.” He is a graduate of the Department of Computer Engineering and Informatics at the University of Patras, with a master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence from Queen Mary & Westfield College at the University of London and a Ph.D. in knowledge representation and information extraction from the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
His research interests encompass the fields of artificial intelligence for content analysis, knowledge representation, human-machine interaction, as well as large-scale data management. He has coordinated several European and national research and development projects in the field of artificial intelligence. He has also organized international conferences, workshops, summer schools, educational programs, and has coordinated the establishment of inter-institutional Master’s programs in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. He is a member of the National Bioethics and Technoethics Committee and leads the “Democratising AI: A National Strategy for Greece” initiative, with a coordinating role in the team developing the National AI Strategy. He has a central role in initiatives and projects aimed at designing and implementing the European AI-on-demand platform.
Vasso Kinti
Vasso Kinti is a Professor of Philosophy of Science and Analytical Philosophy in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She holds a degree in Chemistry from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (EKPA) and a Ph.D. in Philosophy and History of Science from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA).
She has served as a Visiting Scholar at Princeton University and the University of Chicago. She has published books and articles in international and Greek scientific journals on topics related to the philosophy of science, the philosophy of history, ethics, the works of Kuhn, Wittgenstein, Collingwood, and conceptual change. Her most recent book is “Philosophy of History” (Polis 2021), which will be published in English by Bloomsbury Publishers. Since 2019, she has been the Editor-in-Chief of the journal International Studies in Philosophy of Science.
She is the Director of the MSc in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology and was a member of the Council of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (2012-2015). She serves as the national representative on the European Platform for Ethics, Transparency, and Integrity in Education (ETINED) of the Council of Europe. She was a member of the National Council for Research, Technology, and Innovation (2019-2023) and the national representative at the European Research Council (2021-2023). She coordinated the committee for the University 2030 of the Bodossaki Foundation (2020-21).
George Pagoulatos
George Pagoulatos is the Ambassador of Greece to the OECD. He is a Professor of European Politics and Economics at the Department of International and European Economic Studies of the Athens University of Economics and Business and a Visiting Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium (2006-present). He served as the Director General of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP) from 2019 to 2023 and has been a member of the ELIAMEP’s Board of Directors since 2013.
He is a member of the Council of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and has served as a member of the Board of Directors of the European Policy Centre (EPC) in Brussels from 2015 to 2020, as well as a member of the High Council of the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence from 2010 to 2013. He has also served as the President of the Hellenic University Association for European Studies (EPSEES) and as a member of the boards of scientific associations and civil society organizations. He was the National Representative for Greece at the Conference on the Future of Europe from 2021 to 2022. George Pagoulatos has been an unpaid advisor on European affairs to the President of the Hellenic Republic from 2020 to 2023 and served as the Director of Strategic Planning and Advisor to Prime Ministers Loukas Papadimos and Panagiotis Pikrammenos from 2011 to 2012.
He is a regular columnist for the Sunday edition of the newspaper “Kathimerini” from 2007 to 2023. He holds a Bachelor’s degree from the Law School of the University of Athens, a Master’s and Doctoral degree in Political Science from the University of Oxford (1997), where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He also held a research postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University in the USA with a focus on Comparative Politics and Economics. He has published books and numerous chapters in collective volumes and articles in leading international academic journals in the field. His monograph, “Greece’s New Political Economy: State, Finance and Growth from Postwar to EMU” (Oxford St. Antony’s Series, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), received the Academy of Athens Award.
Fereniki Panagopoulou
Fereniki Panagopoulou is an Assistant Professor of Constitutional Law, Data Protection Law, and Bioethics at Panteion University and the Director of the European Laboratory of Bioethics, Technoethics, and Law at Panteion University. She served as a Legal Auditor at the Hellenic Data Protection Authority for eight years. She studied Law at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (undergraduate and postgraduate degree in public law) and Public Health and Law at Harvard University. She holds a first doctoral degree in Constitutional Law and Bioethics from Humboldt University of Berlin and a second doctoral degree in Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She has written eleven monographs on public law and has edited (alone and in collaboration with others) six collective volumes on Bioethics and three collective volumes on public law. She has published numerous studies on constitutional law, bioethics, personal data protection, and new technologies. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Greek National Bioethics Commission of UNESCO, the coordinator of the scientific journals “Administrative Law Journal,” “e-Government,” “DiTE,” and “Dialogues in Public Administration,” General Secretary and Treasurer of the Administrative Studies Company, a member of the Scientific Council of the Tsatsos Foundation, and General Secretary of the Union for the Protection of Privacy and Personal Data.
Ioannis Pittas
Ioannis Pittas (IEEE fellow, IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, EURASIP fellow) is a Ph.D. Electrical Engineer, serves as a professor at the Department of Computer Science at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh). His research interests include artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, computer vision, machine learning, intelligent digital media, and human-centered computing. He serves as the Director of the Artificial Intelligence and Information Analysis Laboratory at AUTh and is the President of the International Artificial Intelligence Doctoral Academy (AIDA).
He has participated in over 75 research and development programs, primarily funded by European organizations, and has been the scientific coordinator for 47 of these programs. He currently leads the research project Horizon Europe TEMA and serves as the main researcher in projects such as Horizon Europe SIMAR, AI4Europe, H2020 Aerial Core, and AI4Media (one of the four flagship projects in Artificial Intelligence by the European Community). He has authored more than 920 papers in international journals and conferences, as well as 45 book chapters.
In addition, he has co-authored or co-edited 15 books, including the four-volume set “AI Science and Society.” Ioannis Pittas has delivered 120 invited lectures at international conferences and universities and has been a visiting professor at 12 universities. He has served as a member of the scientific committees for 291 international conferences, co-organized 33 conferences, and chaired or served as a technical chair for five conferences. His work has received more than 36,500 citations with an h-index of 90+. According to research.com, he is ranked first in Greece and 319th internationally among computer science researchers in 2022.
Timos Sellis
Timos Sellis is the Director of the “Archimedes” Research Unit of the “Athena” Research Center. Most recently he was a Facebook Researcher (USA, 2020-22), and Professor and Director of the Data Science Research Institute at Swinburne University of Technology (Australia, 2016-20). He was previously a faculty member at the University of Maryland (USA, 1986-92), at the National Technical University of Athens (Greece, 1992-2013) and at RMIT University (Australia, 2013-2016), while he was also the Director of the Information Systems Institute of the Research Center at “Athena” Research Center (2007-13).
His research interests include data management, streaming data, graph data management, and spatio- temporal database systems. Timos is a recipient of the prestigious Presidential Young Investigator (PYI) award given by the President of USA to the most talented new researchers (1990), and of the VLDB 1997 10 Year Paper Award in 1997 (awarded to the paper published in the proceedings of the VLDB 1987 conference that had the biggest impact in the field of database systems in the decade 1987-97). He was the president of the National Council for Research and Technology of Greece (2001-2003).
In November 2009, he was awarded the status of IEEE Fellow, for his contributions to database query optimization, and spatial data management, and in November 2013 the status of ACM Fellow, for his contributions to database query optimization, spatial data management, and data warehousing. In March 2018 he received the IEEE TCDE Impact Award, for contributions to database systems research and broadening the reach of data engineering research.
Andreas Stavropoulos
Andreas Stavropoulos is a partner at Threshold (formerly DFJ) Ventures and a member of the firm’s management committee. He currently serves on the boards of a number of private companies, including several in the artificial intelligence and the enterprise infrastructure space, in addition to his involvement with other enabling platform technologies. Before joining DFJ, Andreas was with McKinsey & Company’s San Francisco office, where he worked with senior management teams of corporate clients with an emphasis on information technology.
Andreas is a summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard College in computer science. He also holds an MS degree in computer science from Harvard University and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar and graduated first in his class. In terms of public and non-profit service, Andreas currently serves on the board of the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund (TAIPED), he is the Vice Chairman of Endeavor Greece, and the President of the Alumni Board of Harvard Business School.
John Tasioulas
John Tasioulas is Professor of Ethics and Legal Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford, and inaugural Director of the Institute for Ethics in AI. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford. He was born in Australia, his parents having emigrated from Greece in the early 1960s. He received degrees in philosophy and law from the University of Melbourne and studied as a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford where he completed a D.Phil. He was previously a Reader in Moral and Legal Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford (1998-2010), Quain Professor of Jurisprudence in the Faculty of Laws, University College London (2011-14), and inaugural Yeoh Professor of Politics, Philosophy and Law and Director of the Yeoh Tiong Lay Centre for Politics, Philosophy, and Law at the Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London (2014-2020).
He has held visiting positions at the Australian National University, the University of Chicago, Harvard University, and the University of Melbourne. Among other roles, he has acted as a consultant to the World Bank and is a member of the International Advisory Board, Panel for the Future of Science and Technology (STOA), European Parliament. In collaboration with Professor Hélène Landemore (Yale University) he is currently pursuing a project developing a humanistic ethics of AI funded by Schmidt Futures’ AI2050 Programme.
Charalambos Tsekeris
Charalampos Tsekeris is the Vice President of the National Bioethics & Technoethics Committee, Permanent Member of the National Commission for Human Rights, Visiting Professor at the University of Athens (EKPA), and a Principal Researcher at the Institute of Social Research of the National Center for Social Research (EKKE). His research focus is on the “Sociology of the Internet,” with specialization in digital social research and the ethics of Artificial Intelligence. He has previously served as an External Scientist at ETH Zurich and as a Professor Extraordinary at the School of Public Leadership at Stellenbosch University. Currently, he holds the position of Research Partner at the Anti-Corruption Education and Research Centre (Stellenbosch). He coordinates the research program “World Internet Project-Greece,” which examines the use of new technologies in Greece, and has taught at numerous academic institutions and study programs in Greece and abroad.
Source: Hellenic News of America
