Professor of Information Systems at the Computer Science Department University of Crete, Affiliated Researcher to Information Systems Laboratory (ISL) at FORTH-ICS and Head of the Centre for Cultural Informatics of FORTH-ICS.

Areas of Expertise and Research Interests

• Semantic Data Management
  Large scale semantic integration, knowledge extraction, transformation, linkage, matching, mapping, integration.
• Exploratory Search
  Faceted search, preference-enriched faceted search, decision making, interaction and visualization for information access, scalable and error-tolerant query autocompletion techniques, caching.
• Digital Preservation
  Metadata management, reasoning services for digital preservation.

Recent Research Projects

• Project BlueCloud: Piloting innovative services for Marine Research & the Blue Economy (H2020-EU.3.2.5.1, grant 862409), 1/10/2019-30/9/2022
• Project AI4EU (H2020, ICT-26 2018, grant 825619), 1/1/2019 – 31/12/2022
• Project Linked Data-assisted Statistical Spoken Dialogue System, Funded by TOSHIBA RESEARCH EUROPE Ltd, Cambridge UK, 1/4/2017 – 31/3/2019
• Project Υπηρεσίες για τη Διασύνδεση και Ολοκλήρωση Μεγάλου Πλήθους Σημασιολογικών Συνολοδεδομένων, ΕΛΙΔΕΚ (για χρηματοδότηση διδακτορικής διατριβής), 01/08/2017 - 31/3/2020
• Project BlueBRIDGE (Building Research environments for fostering Innovation, Decision making, Governance and Education to support Blue growth), H2020-EINFRA-2015-1, 1/9/2015-1/3/2018
• Project iMARINE (Data e-Infrastructure Initiative for Fisheries Management and Conservation of Marine Living Resources), FP7 Data Infrastructure for eScience (INFRA 2011-1.2.2), 1/11/2011-30/9/2014
• Project SCIDIP-ES (SCIence Data Infrastructure for Preservation - Earth Science), FP7 Data Infrastructure for eScience (INFRA 2011-1.2.2), 1/9/2011 – 31/12/2014
• NoE APARSEN (Alliance Permanent Access to the Records of Science in Europe), 1/1/2011-31/12/2014
  Project number: 269977, Call: FP7-ICT-2009-6, Network of Excellence
• COST ACTION IC2002 MUMIA (Multilingual and Multifaceted Interactive Information Acess), 2010-2014
  National Representative, Vice Chair of the Working Group on Semantic and Faceted Search
• Project EO-USNG-Phase 2, 1/5/2009 - 30/4/2010
  Scientific responsible for FORTH-ICS for the project EO User Service Next Generation (EO USNG) – Phase 2, Contract Num. with ESA: 21086/07/I-LG, Contr. Num. with ACS: CTR/ACS/FORTH/EO-USNG/09-289/1.0
  Objective: advancing the access services of ESA (European Space Agency). ESA Funding (for FORTH-ICS) : € 35 000.
• Project EO-USNG, 1/2/2008-1/10/2008
  Scientific responsible for FORTH-ICS for the project EO User Service Next Generation (EO USNG), Contr. Num. with ESA: 21086/07/I-LG, Contr. Num. with ACS: CTR/ACS/FORTH/EO-USNG/07-739.
  Objective: advancing the access services of ESA (European Space Agency). ESA Funding (for FORTH-ICS) : € 25 000.
• Project CASPAR, 1/4/2006-30/9/2009
  CASPAR (Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval), FP6-2005-IST-033572, 1/4/2006 - 30/9/2009 (42 months), EU Funding: € 8 800 000.
• Project KP-LAB, 1/2/2006-today
  KP-LAB,FP6-2004-IST-4, 1/2/2006-31/01/2011, EU funding: 11M Euros.
  Participation to the development of the SWKM platform with emphasis on issues related to the comparison (delta) of semantic models and on applying Semantic Technologies for e-learning

Awards and Distinctions

• Recognized Reviewer Award of the 41th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2019), 14-18 April, 2019, Cologne, Germany
• Best Reviewer Award at the 36th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2014), 13-16 April, 2014 Amsterdam (one of the four winners)
• Best Paper Award at the 6th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC'2007), Korea, Nov. 2007, for the paper "On the Foundations of Computing Deltas between RDF models" (work done in collaboration with the MSc student D. Zeginis and Prof. V. Christophides).
• Best Paper Award in the CIA’2003 conference for the work entitled “Ostensive Automatic Schema Mapping for Taxonomy-based Peer-to-Peer Systems” (joint work with Carlo Meghini).
• October 2002 – April 2004
  ERCIM fellowship for postdoctoral studies at ISTI-CNR (Italy) and VTT (Finland).
• Sep 2001 – Sep 2002.
  Maria Michael Manasaki legacy’s fellowship (awarded to the best graduate student of Computer Science department of the University of Crete, once a year).
• June 1992 – October 1997 and December 1999 – September 2002
  Fellowship from FORTH-ICS.

Short CV

Yannis Tzitzikas is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at University of Crete (Greece) and Affiliated Researcher of the Information Systems Laboratory at FORTH-ICS (Greece). He studied at the University of Crete and he conducted post-doctoral research at (a) the University of Namur (Belgium), (b) ISTI-CNR (Pisa, Italy) and (c) VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland.

His expertise lies in Information Systems, specifically in Knowledge Management and Information Retrieval. His research focuses on semantic data integration, exploratory search, and digital preservation. He has coauthored 3 books and more than 150 papers in refereed journals and conferences (including ACM Computing Surveys, ACM Transactions on the Web, VLDB Journal, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, JIIS, JDAPD, ECIR, ISWC, EWSC), he has received two best paper awards (at CIA'2003 and ISWC'07) as well as other awards). He has supervised two PhDs, 24 MSc theses and more than 45 Diploma Theses. He actively participates το EU projects (totaling more than 1,5 MEuros funding for FORTH-ICS) and participates to the scientific committees of several international conferences and journals.

Since 2005 he coordinates the Semantic Access and Retrieval group, and from 2019 also the Head of the Centre for Cultural Informatics of the Information Systems Laboratory of FORTH-ICS. He is the coordinator of the Clarity and Open Data Management Team of the University of Crete and he is member of the Executive Committee ERCIM (the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics).