The Agricultural University of Athens, established in 1920, is the third oldest university in Greece. Since its foundation, it contributes consistently and continuously to both the Greek and European primary sector’s development by conducting applied research in the context of Agriculture related sciences. The Agricultural University of Athens is represented in the EUREKA project by the Smart Farming Technology Group (https://www.linkedin.com/company/sftgaua), which belongs to the department of Natural Resource Management and Agricultural Engineering. The Smart Farming Technology Group has a considerable experience and expertise in the fields of Precision Agriculture, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, as well as Software application development by contributing to a number of H2020 projects as a Task or Work Package leader. In addition to that, the Smart Farming Technology Group coordinates the OPTIMA project (http://optima-h2020.eu/). The role of the Group in the EUREKA project is that of leading the tasks of the creation of the architecture and thedevelopment of the repository to store the data collected from the knowledge repositories of multi-Actor Projects (MAPs). The Smart Farming Technology Group has a considerable contribution, also focusing on data repositories development, to a number of other H2020 projects, namely the EURAKNOS, FAIRShare, and SHERPA projects.
The Smart Farming Technology Group:
The Smart Farming Technology Group is led by Professor Spyros Fountas, who has twenty years of experience in agricultural robotics, precision agriculture technologies, as well as in the implementation and management of crop production – related information systems. He is editor-in-chief in the ELSEVIER journal “Computers and Electronics in Agriculture” and member of the Editorial Board of the Precision Agriculture journal (since 2011). Professor Spyros Fountas has more than 120 research publications, with 45 of them being journal papers, and more than 3,000 citations. He is a digital technologies enthusiast, an advocate of the power of networking and constructive interactions, and a big fan of doing sports.
Stamatia Voulgaraki holds a five-year diploma in Agricultural Engineering and an MSc degree in Energy Systems in Agriculture. She has a 12-year research-related experience in both national and international projects and she has been a Research Associate in the University of Georgia in for two years. She has published two peer-reviewed journal papers and six conference papers. She has experience in the administration of research projects funded by both the Greek government and EU funds and her tasks involve project management in relation to budgeting, administration, direct contact with DG officers, etc.
George Tsiantis has studied business administration at the University of Patras, Greece. He has worked for several years in the aquaculture industry in Greece as an order processing administrator. George has attended advanced courses in Business and State Administration. His role in the Smart Farming Technology Group at the Agriculture University of Athens relates to administrative and financial duties on European projects such as EUREKA, agROBOfood, OPTIMA, SHERPA, and PoliRURal.
Hercules Panoutsopoulos works as a Research Associate in the Smart Farming Technology Group and his work revolves around the conceptual design of data repository systems, semantic web technologies, as well as Natural Language Processing. He is currently involved in the EURAKNOS, EUREKA and SHERPA H2020 projects. Hercules holds a BSc degree in Mathematics and an MSc degree in Technology-enhanced Learning. He has been lead and co-author in a number of conference papers, book chapters and a journal paper.
George Papadopoulos is a Research Associate in the Smart Farming Technology Group. He holds a five-year diploma in Natural Resource Management and his duties involve, among others, the implementation of research experiments and contribution to H2020 project – related tasks. His interests revolve around natural resources management, smart farming, and crop science.
Eleanna Vali is an undergraduate student at the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National and Technical University of Athens. Her work in the Smart Farming Technology Group as a software developer relates to Deep Learning and Computer Vision. She specializes in Machine Learning and Computer Vision, by making use of frameworks like Keras and PyTorch, and has a considerable experience in the fields of Transfer Learning and Image Process.
