Athena RC

The Athena Research and Innovation Center in Information, Communication and Knowledge Technologies was founded in 2003 in three cities, Athens, Patras and Xanthi. It is the only research center in Greece that is exclusively focused on Digital Sciences and Technologies.

Its structure includes four Institutes, on Language and Speech Processing, Industrial Systems, and Information Management Systems, and Robotics, respectively, and seven Units, on Technology Clusters, Space Programs, Environmental and Networking Technologies and Applications, Pharma-Informatics, Sustainable Development, Artificial Intelligence-Data Science-Algorithms, and Women’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship, respectively.

The vision of Athena is to conduct outstanding research in Information and Communication Technologies, pursuing solutions to global challenges, addressing local needs, and producing novel and deep technological results with a broad impact on other sciences, industry, and society at large. In addition to research on core problems in digital technologies, interdisciplinarity is a fundamental characteristic of the activities of Athena, with particular emphasis (but no limitation) on computational elements of the fields of precision agriculture, agri-food, precision medicine, biology, biodiversity, earth observation, space science, engineering, mechanics, linguistics, archaeology, and the arts. Next to its research portfolio, Athena is also very strong in innovation and entrepreneurial activities, including the co-foundation of several successful spin-off companies. The key asset of Athena is its researchers, collaborating faculty, engineers, other professionals, and students, whose deep technical expertise and extensive experience bring Athena to a position of prominence with respect to addressing and solving some challenging scientific and societal problems of our times.

Athena has been actively participating in and/or organizing official Researchers’ Night activities since 2014 in collaboration with other Universities and Research Centers in Greece.