The The Information Technologies Institute (ITI) was founded in 1998 as a non-profit organisation under the auspices of the General Secretariat for Research and Technology of Greece, with its head office located in Thessaloniki, Greece. Since 10.3.2000 it is a founding member of the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH) also supervised by the General Secretariat for Research and Technology (GSRT). CERTH/ITI is one of the leading Institutions of Greece in the fields of Informatics, Telematics and Telecommunications, with long experience in numerous European and national R&D projects, It is active in a large number of research domains such as Security and Surveillance, Image and Signal Processing, Computer & Cognitive Vision, Human Computer Interaction, Virtual and Augmented Reality, Multimedia, Database and Information Systems and Social Media Analysis. CERTH/ITI has participated in more than 60 research projects funded by the European Commission and more than 85 research projects funded by Greek National Research Programmes and Consulting Subcontracts with the Private Sector (I&T Industry). In 2008, the Information Technologies Institute attracted an income of 14 M€ from National and European competitive R&D projects. For the last 10 years, the publication record of ITI includes more than 250 scientific publications in international journals, more than 450 publications in conferences and 70 books and book chapters
The Information Technology Institute exhibits substantial research activity, both basic and industry-oriented, as well as technology transfer actions, in the area of virtual, augmented and mixed realities where included modeling and simulation of complex virtual environments, haptic force feedback applied research, 3D modelling and compression, deformable objects and cloth modelling, collaborative virtual environments, new sensor development for head/hands/body tracking, multimedia analysis/synthesis, gesture recognition, head motion modelling and tracking, advanced applications of virtual/augmented/mixed reality in education and training, e-health, assistive technologies, culture, industry and e-business.
The CERTH/ITI AVRLab operates a fully operational and well-equipped Virtual Reality Laboratory that serves as a reference for augmented and virtual reality applications and demonstrations in Greece. It employs a high quality scientific group of personnel for the design, development and demonstration of advanced augmented and virtual reality applications and services. It participates in research networks with assorted institutes and industrial partners in Greece and Europe and is in the process of establishing a spin-off company, to commercially exploit the research results (already available as prototypes) of the Laboratory.
Concluding, CERTH/ITI has high experience in the topics and objectives of the MOMIRAS project. CERTH/ITI (Dr. Dimitrios Tzovaras) was the coordinator of the FP6 IST project VICTORY: “Audio-VIsual ConTent search and retrieval in a distributed P2P repositORY” and FP7 ICT project I-SEARCH “A unIfied framework for multimodal content SEARCH”. Moreover, it participates in CUBRIC-IP “Human-enchanced time-aware multimedia search”, in which technologies related to multimedia annotation, visualization and feature extraction from media are being developed by CERTH/ITI.