Dr Vasilios Tountopoulos

Dr Vasilios Tountopoulos is IT Consultant in the Consulting Department of Athens Technology Center S.A. (ATC).

In the panel, Dr Tountopoulos will discuss how new media is giving the power of speech and opinion-forming back to citizens and individuals. More and more people are reporting, blogging and tweeting. The challenge is to deal with the massive amounts of information in text, images, audio and video, which constitute the sphere of "digital gossips" and try to discover the truth. This can be enabled through analysis of existing information sources in the Internet to find out what people are talking about; cluster pictures and videos that are being posted to figure out what supporting evidence is provided to what people are claiming that is happening. In this context, ATC has long standing experience in the Media Sector by providing specific solutions as an active and leading supplier of newsroom, editorial and archive specific editorial solutions with a particular emphasis on News and Press Agencies and Publishing organisations. The initial engine of the Suite was developed in a Greek State R&D Project (in 1996), whereas new collaboration enabling versions with strong search capabilities and mobile extensions are currently being researched in EU Projects. Central to the Company's strategy is the conduction of vivid Research and Development in the area of AI media applications, focusing both in improving current Products and Solutions, through incorporating functionalities for multimedia analysis and semantic search, as well as in exploring new technologies for future growth.

Biographical Note:
Dr Vasilios Tountopoulos is working as an IT consultant in the ATC Consulting Department. He received the diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Patras in 2000, and the PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 2005. He has been involved in EU R&D and National funded projects in ATC and, previously, as a research associate, in the Telecommunications Systems and Computer Networks Laboratories of the ICCS/NTUA. His research interests include service and resource management systems for wireless IP networks, traffic modelling and performance evaluation, distributed information systems and multimedia services. Dr Tountopoulos is a member of the Technical Chamber of Greece.