The National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) is the oldest and most prestigious educational institution of Greece in the field of technology, and has contributed unceasingly to the country’s scientific, technical and economic development since its foundation in 1836. NTUA is divided into nine academic Schools, eight being for the engineering sciences, including architecture, and one for the general sciences. The School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE NTUA) is well known in Greece and abroad for the research achievements of its faculty members and the good reputation of its students and alumni. The research performed in the ECE School is both of wide scope and high standard, in both fundamental and applied research, securing substantial grants from its researchers’ participation in competitive research programs in national and European level. According to Shanghai Rankings, the ECE School is ranked 101-150 among all Universities in the research fields of Computer Science and Telecommunications, while according to QS Top Universities, the School is ranked 113 in the broader field of Engineering and Technology.

The Artificial Intelligence and Learning Systems Laboratory (AILS Lab) is one of the main research units of the ECE NTUA, directed by Professor Georgios Stamou. AILS Lab has been established as the union of two major ECE Laboratories, the Image, Video and Multimedia Laboratory (IVML) and the Intelligent Systems Laboratory (ISLab), pioneering from 1989 in areas like neural networks, multimedia content analysis, human interaction, fuzzy logics, ontological knowledge representation and reasoning. Currently, AILS Lab has in total 40 members, 4 faculty, 3 faculty associates, 5 senior and post doc researchers, 22 researchers and Ph.D students, and 6 supporting and technical staff, that are active members of the research community, having published more than 200 journal and 400 international conference papers. AILS Lab has organised major International Conferences on semantic content and multimedia analysis, artificial intelligence and machine learning and has been involved in more than a hundred EU R&D projects (7 of them running), in the area of artificial intelligence, machine learning and applications like multimedia content analysis, digital cultural heritage and data analysis. Finally, members of the AILS Lab has been participating in several standardising organisations and activities (MPEG, W3C, RuleML, RRA and others).