The Technical University of Crete (TUC), founded in 1977 in Chania, Crete, is the youngest of the two technical universities in Greece (the other one is the National Technical University of Athens). The purpose of this state institution is to provide high-quality undergraduate as well as graduate studies in modern engineering fields demanded by the Greek and international job market, to conduct research in cutting edge technologies as well as to develop links with the Greek and European industry. TUC is committed to staying at the forefront of educational and intellectual development in the areas of research and teaching both in Greece and internationally.
The Telecommunications Systems Institute (TSI) is a legally independent University Research Institute affiliated with TUC's Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering (www.ece.tuc.gr) and established in 1995, with its own administration and infrastructure. Owing in part to a highly successful targeted recruiting effort in concert with the Department of ECE, TSI has developed a pool of senior researchers with world-class credentials. It is funded mainly from external research grants and contracts in telecommunications, networking, and systems, and has strong experience in participating in European FP6/FP7 projects. World-class academic excellence of TSI is demonstrated by the prestigious, annual, IEEE-society level, journal publication awards, TSI researchers consistently received over the last 10 years. The Software Technology and Network Applications (SoftNet) Laboratory (http://www.softnet.tuc.gr), part of the Department of ECE, represents TSI in the present proposal. The current research activities of the SoftNet group focus on database management systems, data mining, centralized and distributed data-stream processing, cloud computing, distributed and peer-to-peer systems, and sensor networks. SoftNet members publish regularly in these areas in major international forums and journals, and have recently been participating in the FP7 FET-Open project LIFT (http://www.lift-eu.org) and the FP7 Marie-Curie project HeisenData (http://heisendata.softnet.tuc.gr).
Key personnel
Prof. Minos Garofalakis received the Diploma degree in Computer Engineering and Informatics (School of Engineering Valedictorian) from the University of Patras, Greece in 1992, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1994 and 1998, respectively. He worked as a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill, NJ (1998-2005), as a Senior Researcher at Intel Research Berkeley in Berkeley, CA (2005-2007), and as a Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research in Santa Clara, CA (2007-2008). In parallel, he also held an Adjunct Associate Professor position at the EECS Department of the University of California, Berkeley (2006-2008). As of October 2008, he is a Professor of Computer Science at the Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering of the Technical University of Crete, and the Director of the Software Technology and Network Applications (SoftNet) Laboratory. He has published over 110 research papers in the areas of database management systems, data-stream processing, and data mining. Harzing's Publish-or-Perish gives over 7,500 citations to his work and an h-index value of 45. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist (2011), and a recipient of the Bell Labs Presidents Gold Award (2004) and the IEEE ICDE Best Paper Award (2009).
Dr. Odysseas Papapetrou received a PhD in Computer Science from University of Hannover, supported by the L3S Research Center. He obtained his M.Sc. in Computer Science from Saarland University, Germany, supported with a scholarship from Max Planck Institut für Informatik, and a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Cyprus. Since 2011, he is a postdoctoral researcher at the Software Technology and Network Applications (SoftNet) Lab of the Technical University of Crete, working on distributed systems, with a special focus on distributed stream processing and Peer-to-peer networks.
