@article {828, title = {Chatbots for Cultural Venues: A Topic-Based Approach}, journal = {Algorithms}, volume = {16}, year = {2023}, month = {jul}, pages = {339}, abstract = {

Digital assistants{\textemdash}such as chatbots{\textemdash}facilitate the interaction between persons and machines and are increasingly used in web pages of enterprises and organizations. This paper presents a methodology for the creation of chatbots that offer access to museum information. The paper introduces an information model that is offered through the chatbot, which subsequently maps the museum{\textquoteright}s modeled information to structures of DialogFlow, Google{\textquoteright}s chatbot engine. Means for automating the chatbot generation process are also presented. The evaluation of the methodology is illustrated through the application of a real case, wherein we developed a chatbot for the Archaeological Museum of Tripolis, Greece.

}, keywords = {chatbots, cultural venues, Museums, RDF triples, topics}, doi = {10.3390/a16070339}, url = {https://doi.org/10.3390/a16070339}, author = {Vasilis Bouras and Dimitris Spiliotopoulos and Dionisis Margaris and Costas Vassilakis and Konstantinos Kotis and Angeliki Antoniou and George Lepouras and Manolis Wallace and Vassilis Poulopoulos} } @conference {809, title = {Digital applications for the preservation of historic memory: the case of the Kalamata digital museum (greek title: Ψηφιακές εφαρμογές για τη διατήρηση της ιστορικής μνήμης: Η περίπτωση του ψηφιακού μουσείου Καλαμάτας)}, booktitle = {4th PanHellenic Conference on Digital Cultural Heritage-EuroMed 2021}, year = {2021}, abstract = {

The evolution in technology and informatics have changed all aspects of our lives, including civilization-related ones. And while interdisciplinary research involving the scientific disciplines of human sciences and informatics was underdeveloped for many years, it seems that informatics and technology can constitute the catalyst for the rapid advancement of certain areas in human sciences. This has become more than apparent during the last decade, especially in museums and venues related to civilization, where the application of technology, both for the improvement of the visitors{\textquoteright} experience and for the support of scientists (archaeologists, museologists etc), is now taken as granted. In particular, the measures that have been applied during the last two years of the COVID19 pandemic, further accelerate the developments towards digitalization and switching to an online world. The "Kalamata 1821: roads of freedom" project was the starting point for the creation of the first mixed digital museum in the region of the Peloponnese; this museum is strongly related to the history of Greece, starting from the Revolution of 1821 and its relationship with Kalamata. This paper analyses the process of design, preparation and implementation of digital multimedia applications that are installed on the digital museum infrastructure. The applications have been designed to maximize the information that can be perceived within the limited time frame during of a museum visit, offering in parallel means to obtain some of the information presented and store them on a mobile device.

}, author = {Poulopoulos, Vassileios and Wallace, Manolis and Antoniou, Antzela and Vassilakis, Costas and Panagiotidi, Vayia and Zacharias, Nikolaos} } @article {723, title = {A Fine-grained Social Network Recommender System}, journal = {Social Network Analysis and Mining}, volume = {10}, year = {2020}, abstract = {Recommender systems have greatly evolved in recent years and have become an integral part of the Web. From e-commerce sites to mobile apps, our daily routine revolves around a series of {\textquotedblleft}small{\textquotedblright} decisions that are influenced by such recommendations. In a similar manner, online social networks recommend only a subset of the massive amount of content published by a user{\textquoteright}s friends. However, the prevalent approach for the content selection process in such systems is driven by the amount of interaction between the user and the friend who published the content. As a result, content of interest is often lost due to weak social ties. In this paper, we present a fine-grained recommender system for social ecosystems, designed to recommend media content (e.g., music videos, online clips) published by the user{\textquoteright}s friends. The system design was driven by the findings of our qualitative user study that explored the value and requirements of a recommendation component within a social network. The core idea behind the proposed approach was to leverage the abundance of preexisting information in each user{\textquoteright}s account for creating interest profiles, to calculate similarity scores at a fine-grained level for each friend. The intuition behind the proposed method was to find consistent ways to obtain information representations that can identify overlapping interests in very specific sub-categories (e.g., two users{\textquoteright} music preferences may only coincide on hard rock). While the system is intended as a component of the social networking service, we developed a proof-of-concept implementation for Facebook and explored the effectiveness of our underlying mechanisms for content analysis. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach, as the recommended content of interest was both overlooked by the existing Facebook engine and not contained in the users{\textquoteright} Facebook News Feed. We also conducted a user study for exploring the usability aspects of the prototype and found that it offers functionality that could significantly improve user experience in popular services.}, keywords = {Content Analysis, Interest Profiles, Recommender Systems, Social Networks, Usability}, issn = {1869-5469}, doi = {10.1007/s13278-019-0621-7}, author = {Markos Aivazoglou and Antonios Roussos and Dionisis Margaris and Costas Vassilakis and Sotiris Ioannidis and Jason Polakis and Dimitris Spiliotopoulos} } @article {770, title = {A Semantic Mixed Reality Framework for Shared Cultural Experiences Ecosystems}, journal = {Big Data and Cognitive Computing}, volume = {4}, year = {2020}, month = {4/2020}, pages = {6}, abstract = {This paper presents SemMR, a semantic framework for modelling interactions between human and non-human entities and managing reusable and optimized cultural experiences, towards a shared cultural experience ecosystem that might seamlessly accommodate mixed reality experiences. The SemMR framework synthesizes and integrates interaction data into semantically rich reusable structures and facilitates the interaction between different types of entities in a symbiotic way, within a large, virtual, and fully experiential open world, promoting experience sharing at the user level, as well as data/application interoperability and low-effort implementation at the software engineering level. The proposed semantic framework introduces methods for low-effort implementation and the deployment of open and reusable cultural content, applications, and tools, around the concept of cultural experience as a semantic trajectory or simply, experience as a trajectory (eX-trajectory). The methods facilitate the collection and analysis of data regarding the behaviour of users and their interaction with other users and the environment, towards optimizing eX-trajectories via reconfiguration. The SemMR framework supports the synthesis, enhancement, and recommendation of highly complex reconfigurable eX-trajectories, while using semantically integrated disparate and heterogeneous related data. Overall, this work aims to semantically manage interactions and experiences through the eX-trajectory concept, towards delivering enriched cultural experiences.}, keywords = {cultural experience, intelligent interaction, Mixed Reality, semantics, Usability}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.3390/bdcc4020006}, author = {Costas Vassilakis and Konstantinos Kotis and Dimitris Spiliotopoulos and Dionisis Margaris and Vlasios Kasapakis and Christos-Nikolaos Anagnostopoulos and Georgios Santipantakis and George A. Vouros and Theodore Kotsilieris and Volha Petukhova and Andrei Malchanau and Ioanna Lykourentzou and Kaj Michael Helin and Artem Revenko and Nenad Gligoric and Boris Pokric} } @conference {Theodoropoulos_2019_atmf, title = {ATMF: A student-centered framework for the effective implementation of alternative teaching methods for CSEd}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Innovative Teaching of Introductory Topics in Information Technology - 3(IT) Workshop in the context of the 19th IFIP Conference on e-Business, e-Services and e-Society (I3E 2019)}, year = {2019}, month = {01/2020}, abstract = {

The dynamic development of Informatics introduces new educational and pedagogical challenges, including the instructional design of teaching and learning. How can we teach our students better in such a growing and demanding field? Moreover, how can we motivate them and together have better learning results? This paper aims to give answers to these questions, through a student-centered framework for effectively encompassing alternative teaching methods within CS. The proposed framework (ATMF) summarizes the benefits of alternative teaching methods in contrast with known is-sues of traditional teaching. In addition, ATMF is built upon empirical evidence and concludes that alternative practices, if used under the right conditions, can provide increased motivation for learning and better learning out-comes.

}, keywords = {Alternative Teaching Methods, Computer Science Education, Teaching Framework}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-39634-3_11}, author = {Anastasios Theodoropoulos and Costas Vassilakis and Angela Antoniou and Manolis Wallace and Giorgos Lepouras} } @article {715, title = {Bringing a peripheral, traditional venue to the digital era with targeted narratives}, journal = {Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage}, volume = {14}, year = {2019}, month = {sep}, pages = {e00111}, abstract = {The current work presents a method of enhancing museum content with narratives targeting history reflection in a personalized manner, delivered by an especially designed mobile app. The mobile app is a part of a technology ecosystem that supports the visitor before, during and after her visit. Within the framework of the European H2020 CrossCult project, a method was designed, implemented and tested to enhance museum content with digital material, enriched narratives and means to actively engage visitors. In particular, the method was implemented and tested for the content of the Archaeological Museum of Tripolis (Greece) and specific content examples are presented here, together with data from visitor evaluation. The results showed that content was significantly and qualitatively enhanced and visitors recognized the potential of the app in triggering visitor curiosity, new forms of engagement, and the ability to reflect on the connections between historical and social phenomena.}, keywords = {Cultural heritage, Museum app, Narratives, reflection, Visitor experience}, doi = {10.1016/j.daach.2019.e00111}, url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212054819300098}, author = {Angeliki Antoniou and Susana Reboreda Morillo and George Lepouras and Jason Diakoumakos and Costas Vassilakis and Martin Lopez Nores and Catherine Emma Jones} } @conference {Antoniou_2019_Mytilene, title = {Cultural technologies: the case of the Tripolis archeological museum (in Greek; Greek title: "ΠΟΛΙΤΙΣΤΙΚΕΣ ΤΕΧΝΟΛΟΓΙΕΣ: Η ΠΕΡΙΠΤΩΣΗ ΤΟΥ ΑΡΧΑΙΟΛΟΓΙΚΟΥ ΜΟΥΣΕΙΟΥ ΤΡΙΠΟΛΗΣ")}, booktitle = {Book of abstracts of the 2nd Conference of the School of Social Sciences of the University of the Aegean "Social sciences today: dilemmas and prospectives beyond the crisis"}, year = {2019}, abstract = {The Tripolis archeological museum hosts magnificent ancient art exhibits from the whole of the Arcadia county. However, a series of issues, including the old-style museological exhibition and the limited informational material offered to the visitor, combined with the lack of digital presence for the museum, lead to a low number of visitors. Culural technologies may offer solutions to these issues that the museum fronts, and to this end the museum was included in the CrossCult EU project (www.crosscult.eu). In the context of the project, the antecendents regarding the technological design for the particular museum were studied (staff, visitor and technological equipment needs), and the characteristics of the museum collections were examined. With the collaboration of the Ephorate of Antiquities of Arcadia, the most important and characteristic exhibits were identified, among those that were linked to the position of the woman in the ancient society. Using these exhibits as a basis, 7 thematic itineraries were created in both the English and the Greek language, which support the user in visiting the museum halls and exhibitions and learning certain aspects of women{\textquoteright}s lives in the antiquity (e.g. education, everyday life, social status, etc). Each exhibit is linked with different digital cultural artefacts (e.g. images from other collections, related videos, games, sound clips etc.), to create narratives that increase user engagement and stimulate reflection. In parallel, a series of games was deveped, aiming to disseminate the presence of the museum and the information sourced from it through the social networks, assist in creating user profiles and further promote the museum. Finally, user experience can continue after the visit, through the use of a specialized social network, created specifically for the needs of the museum. (Abstract in Greek follows: Το αρχαιολογικό μουσείο Τρίπολης στεγάζει καταπληκτικά δείγματα αρχαίας τέχνης από ολόκληρο τον νομό Αρκαδίας. Όμως μια σειρά προβλημάτων, όπως η παλαιού τύπου μουσειολογική έκθεση και το πολύ συνοπτικό πληροφοριακό υλικό που προσφέρεται στον επισκέπτη, μαζί με το γεγονός ότι το μουσείο δεν έχει ψηφιακή παρουσία, οδηγεί σε χαμηλή επισκεψιμότητα. Οι πολιτιστικές τεχνολογίες μπορούν να προσφέρουν λύσεις στα προβλήματα του μουσείου και έτσι το μουσείο εντάχθηκε στο Ευρωπαϊκό ερευνητικό έργο CrossCult (www.crosscult.eu). Μέσα στα πλαίσια του έργου, μελετήθηκαν τα προαπαιτούμενα σχεδιασμού τεχνολογιών για το συγκεκριμένο χώρο (ανάγκες προσωπικού, ανάγκες επισκεπτών, ανάγκες τεχνολογικού εξοπλισμού), καθώς και τα χαρακτηριστικά των συλλογών. Με τη βοήθεια της Εφορείας Αρχαιοτήτων Αρκαδίας, εντοπίστηκαν τα σημαντικότερα και χαρακτηριστικότερα εκθέματα, γύρω από το θέμα της θέσης της γυναίκας στον αρχαίο κόσμο. Με βάσει τα εκθέματα αυτά, δημιουργήθηκαν 7 θεματικές διαδρομές (σε Ελληνικά και Αγγλικά) όπου ο επισκέπτης μπορεί να περιηγηθεί στο μουσείο και να μάθει για συγκεκριμένες πτυχές της ζωής των γυναικών (π.χ. εκπαίδευση, καθημερινότητα, κοινωνική θέση, κλπ). Το κάθε έκθεμα συνδέεται με διαφορετικά ψηφιακά πολιτιστικά αντικείμενα (π.χ. εικόνες από εκθέματα άλλων συλλογών, σχετικά βίντεο, παιχνίδια, αρχεία ήχου, κλπ) για να δημιουργηθούν αφηγήσεις που να αυξάνουν τον προβληματισμό και την εμπλοκή του επισκέπτη. Παράλληλα, μια σειρά παιχνιδιών υλοποιήθηκε με σκοπό τη διάχυση στα μέσα κοινωνικής δικτύωσης για τη δημιουργία προφίλ επισκεπτών και την περαιτέρω διαφήμιση του μουσείου. Τέλος, η εμπειρία μπορεί να συνεχιστεί και μετά την επίσκεψη με τη χρήση εξειδικευμένου κοινωνικού δικτύου, φτιαγμένου ειδικά για τους επισκέπτες του μουσείου.)}, url = {https://www.propobos.gr/?id=3247\&\&atfc=3250}, author = {Angela Antoniou and Giorgos Lepouras and Costas Vassilakis and Manolis Wallace and Nikos Platis} } @conference {725, title = {Kalamata 1821: Roads of Freedom - Digital applications teach history (Greek title: Καλαμάτα 1821: Δρόμοι Ελευθερίας {\textendash} Οι ψηφιακές εφαρμογές διδάσκουν ιστορία)}, booktitle = {2nd Panhellenic conference on Open Educational Resources and e-learning}, year = {2019}, abstract = {The {\textquotedblleft}Kalamata 1821: Roads of Freedom{\textquotedblright} project is an effort for scientifically organizing the celebration of the 200-year anniversary from the liberation of Greece from the Turkish thrall, with a special focus on the city of Kalamata. The project, aiming to link historical memories to the modern era, includes a major section related to the development of digital applications. The project{\textquoteright}s digital applications are developed by the Knowledge and Uncertainty lab of the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the University of the Peloponnese. The digital applications are based on the information provided by the historical scientific team of the project. Within the project, two distinct groups of applications are developed, in order to cover the diverse needs of the target population. The nature of the applications is clearly didactic, offering detailed information regarding historical facts, places and persons which relate to the Greek War of Independence, as well as on locations where important events took place. The Interactive Table applications are a group of applications which will be available to the public visiting the historic building of the old Town Hall of Kalamata, where the project exhibition center is located. These applications constitute a modern, interactive, digital encyclopedia of the relation between the city of Kalamata and the Greek War of Independence. For the Interactive Table, three original applications were developed. The first depicts histories and facts linked to some points on a map. The second presents a tree of histories, that is histories that are interrelated, and where each visitor may familiarize with facts and persons that are linked to each other. Finally, the third application focuses on images and multimedia, challenging the visitors to identify and elaborate on events and histories hiding behind pictures. The second group consists of a single application that targets on a wider public that prefers a different type on interaction. Effectively this application implements a scavenger hunt with historic content. The goal of this application is to motivate the visitor of the city of Kalamata to wander around the city, and also to link the project to the local market.}, keywords = {Educational applications, Interactive table, Mobile applications}, author = {M. Wallace and V. Poulopoulos and A. Antoniou and C. Vassilakis and G. Lepouras and J. Diakoumakos and V. Panagiotidou} } @conference {714, title = {PaloAnalytics project concept, scope and outcomes: an opportunity for culture}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Cultural Informatics, co-located with the 14th International Workshop On Semantic And Social Media Adaptation And Personalization (SMAP 2019)}, year = {2019}, abstract = {This paper describes the national funded project entitled PaloAnalytics, which develops an innovative platform that allows companies and organizations, that operate in several countries, to monitor and analyze, in depth, the markets{\textquoteright} interest to their products and successfully plan their marketing and communication strategy, with data and insights collected from all the local media, and focuses on its application to cultural spaces and museums. In this notion, we examine the effect that this project can have in cultural spaces or companies related to arts and culture. PaloAnalytics platform allows organizations to investigate the impact of their products on consumers across different countries and this is achieved with the analysis of content from sites, blogs, social networks and open data. This implies that cultural organization can benefit by adopting the implemented services, so that the can recognize and analyze their audience, their online marketing campaigns as well as examine the impact of their messages and the spread of their messages on the Internet. In this paper, we briefly describe the project and discuss on the impact on cultural related organizations.}, keywords = {big data, data monitoring, Data visualization, deep learning, influencers, infographics, trending topics}, url = {http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2412/paper7.pdf}, author = {Vassilis Poulopoulos and Manolis Wallace and Costas Vassilakis and George Lepouras}, editor = {Angeliki Antoniou and Manolis Wallace} } @conference {726, title = {Scavenger Hunt in the Roads of Freedom (Greek title: {\textquotedblleft}Κυνήγι θησαυρού στους Δρόμους της Ελευθερίας")}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 3nd Pan-Hellenic Conference on Digital Cultural Heritage-EuroMed 2019}, year = {2019}, abstract = {The project "Kalamata 1821: Roads of freedom" is being funded in the context of the Action "RESEARCH - CREATE - INNOVATE. The project, which encompasses original historic research work in the University of the Peloponnese, is an effort to narrate a historic course of 200 years for the city of Kalamata, from the eruption of the Greek revolution until today, through a modern and fresh perspective. This paper will present one of the digital applications developed within the project, and more specifically the Scavenger Hunt that is being developed by the Knowledge and Uncertainty lab of the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications in Tripolis. The game is designed for mobile devices and its goal is to link the historic content of the project with the contemporary city and, in a gamified fashion, assist the user not only to familiarize with the history of the city but also to navigate in the city and connect with the local market. By searching through pictures of various locations of the city, the visitor is directed to the most outstanding locations of the war of independence, and learns about the contribution of the city of Kalamata in this turning point for the history of the Greek nation. At the same time, the visitor is rewarded by receiving offers for local stores.}, keywords = {Greek War of Independence, Kalamata, Roads of Freedom, Scavenger Hunt}, author = {Manolis Wallace and Vassilis Poulopoulos and George Lepouras and Costas Vassilakis and Angeliki Antoniou} } @conference {727, title = {Supporting small museums through social network semantic analysis (Greek title: Υποστήριξη μικρών μουσείων μέσω της σημασιολογικής ανάλυσης κοινωνικών δικτύων)}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 3nd Pan-Hellenic Conference on Digital Cultural Heritage-EuroMed 2019}, year = {2019}, abstract = {Greece has a significant historic, archaeological and cultural wealth, and a big number of museums and related venues. Some of them are big, both in size and resources -human as well as financial. Most venues however are small in size, are not connected with larger organizations, have constrained budgets and little or no permanent staff. In this paper, we focus on that particular category of museums. Many of these museums possess noteworthy collections, and it would be desirable if the general public could enjoy them. Unfortunately, in most cases, even the existence of the museums is not generally known, even to inhabitants of the cities at which the museums are located. The small number of visitors leads to confined revenues, and this in turn leads to a situation which is not financially viable. In order for a small museum to survive, its existence and value must be made known to the wide public. However, this is inhibited due to the lack of resources to finance advertising and the lack of specialized personnel. In this paper, we combine our experiences on small museums, which has been developed within the CrossCult H2020 project, with know-how on social network analysis which has been gained in the context of the PaloAnalytics national project, in order to offer viable solutions for promotion, which are tailored to the needs of small museums.}, keywords = {semantic analysis, small-sized museums, Social Networks}, author = {Manolis Wallace and Vassilis Poulopoulos and George Lepouras and Costas Vassilakis and Angeliki Antoniou} } @conference {724, title = {TripMentor: Challenges and prospects for culture and tourism in the Attica region (Greek title: {\textquotedblleft}TripMentor: προκλήσεις και προοπτικές για τον πολιτισμό και τον τουρισμό στην περιφέρεια Αττικής{\textquotedblleft})}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 3nd Pan-Hellenic Conference on Digital Cultural Heritage-EuroMed 2019}, year = {2019}, abstract = {This paper presents the TripMentor project which is related to the tourism and civilization in the region of Attica. The main goal of the project is the presentation, in two languages, of the rich cultural content of the region to the tourists, through an Internet-based environment and through mobile applications. The goal of the project is to guide the visitors through many possible alternative routes, which include points of interest, as well as enterprises with tourism-related offers, while at the same time attempts to combine these routes with cultural points of interest. The project interrelates information, venues and visitor profiles with an automated way, striving to offer a unique personalized experience, tailored to the needs and preferences of each user. The project challenges are mainly technical, since through the project procedures (a) information regarding the points of interest should be gathered in an automated fashion (b) information about events related to points of interest must be taken into account and (v) data related to users, and especially the user profiles must be discovered and exploited so that the available information can be synthesized into a unique experience. In this context, we present the project application domain and the related challenges.}, keywords = {cultural information, culture, geospatial data, Social Networks, tourism, visitor profile}, author = {Costas Vassilakis and Vassilis Poulopoulos and Manolis Wallace and Angeliki Antoniou and George Lepouras} } @conference {713, title = {TripMentor Project: scope and challenges}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Cultural Informatics, co-located with the 14th International Workshop On Semantic And Social Media Adaptation And Personalization (SMAP 2019)}, year = {2019}, abstract = {We present Tripmentor, a novel project, that is related to tourism in the region of Attica. The project has as main scope to provide rich media content to tourists through a web and mobile environment in two languages trying to guide them through alternative routes that include places of interest as well as organizations with offers to tourists. The project interconnects people with places and events in an automated manner trying to personalize on each tourist{\textquoteright}s personality. The challenges of the project are mainly technological as through the processes of the project a) automated information about venues must be collected, b) information about events related to venues must be fetched and finally c) data related to system users and mainly their profile should be discovered and created in order to offer a unique experience to each of them. We present the scope of the project as well as the challenges of its implementation.}, keywords = {cultural related information, geodata, personalization, social media, tourism, tripmentor}, url = {http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2412/paper6.pdf}, author = {Costas Vassilakis and Vassilis Poulopoulos and Manolis Wallace and Angeliki Antoniou and George Lepouras}, editor = {Angeliki Antoniou and Manolis Wallace} } @article {DBLP:journals/bdr/Chatzigeorgakidis19, title = {Visual Exploration of Geolocated Time Series with Hybrid Indexing}, journal = {Big Data Research}, volume = {15}, year = {2019}, pages = {12{\textendash}28}, doi = {10.1016/j.bdr.2019.02.001}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bdr.2019.02.001}, author = {Georgios Chatzigeorgakidis and Kostas Patroumpas and Dimitrios Skoutas and Spiros Athanasiou and Spiros Skiadopoulos} } @inbook {Vasilakis2018BigData, title = {Big Data Platforms and Applications}, year = {2018}, publisher = {Springer}, organization = {Springer}, chapter = {exhiSTORY: Smart self-organizing exhibits}, abstract = {Creating stories for exhibitions is a fascinating and in parallel laborious task. As every exhibition is designed to tell a story, museum curators are responsible for identifying, for each exhibit, its aspects that fit to the message of the story and position the exhibit at the right place in the story thread. In this context we analyze how the technological advances in the fields of sensors and Internet of Things can be utilized in order to construct a "smart space", which consists of self-organizing exhibits that cooperate with each other and provide visitors with comprehensible, rich, diverse, personalized and highly stimulating experiences. We present the system named "exhiSTORY" that intends to provide the appropriate infrastructure to be used in museums and places where exhibitions are held in order to support smart exhibits. The architecture of the system and its application potential is presented and discussed.}, author = {Costas Vassilakis and Vassilis Poulopoulos and Angela Antoniou and Manolis Wallace and Giorgos Lepouras and Martin Lopez Nores}, editor = {TBC} } @conference {poulopoulos2018a, title = {The Effect of Social Media Trending Topics Related to Cultural Venues{\textquoteright} Content}, booktitle = {2018 13th International Workshop on Semantic and Social Media Adaptation and Personalization (SMAP)}, year = {2018}, month = {sep}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, abstract = {Social media have gained the majority of attention on the Internet having an extreme number of daily visitors worldwide. The amount of information exchanged is vast, while users have become equally producers and consumers of data. Words like {\textquotedblleft}trending{\textquotedblright}, {\textquotedblleft}influencers{\textquotedblright}, {\textquotedblleft}likes{\textquotedblright} and {\textquotedblleft}viral{\textquotedblright} are in the daily agenda of data analyzers, as they are associated with factors that play an important role in the influence of social media content to its audience. These aspects are nowadays strongly taken into account by organizations that want to draw the public{\textquoteright}s attention to the content they deliver, and in this context cultural institutions have already started to take under great consideration not only their presence in social media, but also the exploitation of social media dynamics. In this paper we propose a method that can enable cultural venues to benefit from matches between their own content and ongoing discussions on social media. More specifically we extract trending topics that can be related semantically with the content of a cultural institute and examine how a venue can benefit by exploiting these matches. The proposed algorithm has been developed in the scope of the {\textquotedblleft}CrossCult{\textquotedblright} H2020 project, and has been experimentally tested by analyzing the case of Twitter in Greek language.}, keywords = {cultural informatics, cultural venues, personalization, social media, trending topics}, doi = {10.1109/SMAP.2018.8501878}, author = {Vassilis Poulopoulos and Costas Vassilakis and Manolis Wallace and Angela Antoniou and Giorgos Lepouras} } @conference {PoulopoulosGIIS2018, title = {ExhiSTORY: IoT in the service of Cultural Heritage}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Global Information Infrastructure and Networking Symposium (GIIS 2018), Special Session on IoT and Cultural Heritage Protection}, year = {2018}, month = {oct}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, abstract = {Creating stories for exhibitions is a fascinating and in parallel laborious task. As every exhibition is designed to tell a story, museum curators are responsible for analyzing each exhibit in order to extract messages that form a story and position accordingly the objects in correct order within the museum space. In this context, we analyze how the technological advances in the fields of sensors and the Internet of Things can be utilized in order to construct a {\textquotedblleft}smart space{\textquotedblright}, where exhibits can communicate with the visitors and to each other and can be organized automatically so that they can generate rich, personalized, coherent and highly stimulating experiences. We present the architecture of the system named {\textquotedblleft}exhiSTORY{\textquotedblright}, that intends to provide the appropriate infrastructure to be used in museums and places where exhibitions are held, in order to support smart exhibits. We discuss and analyze the architecture of the system and the ways of its application in a cultural space.}, doi = {10.1109/GIIS.2018.8635759}, author = {Vassilis Poulopoulos and Costas Vassilakis and Angela Antoniou and Manolis Wallace and Giorgos Lepouras and Martin Lopez Nores} } @article {Vassilakis_fgcs17, title = {exhiSTORY: Smart Exhibits That Tell Their Own Stories}, journal = {Future Generation of Computer Systems}, volume = {81}, year = {2018}, pages = {542-556}, abstract = {Museum exhibitions are designed to tell a story; this story is woven by curators and in its context a particular aspect of each exhibit, fitting to the message that the story is intended to convey, is highlighted. Adding new exhibits to the story requires curators to identify for each exhibit its aspects that fit to the message of the story and position the exhibit at the right place in the story thread. The availability of rich semantic information for exhibits, allows for exploiting the wealth of meanings that museum exhibits express, enabling the automated or semi-automated generation of practically countless stories that can be told. Personalization algorithms can then be employed to choose from these stories the ones most suitable for each individual user, based on the semantics of the stories and information within the user profile. In this work we examine how opportunities arising from technological advances in the fields of IoT and semantics can be used to develop smart, self-organizing exhibits that cooperate with each other and provide visitors with comprehensible, rich, diverse, personalized and highly stimulating experiences. These notions are included in the design of a system named exhiSTORY, which also exploits previously ignored information and identifies previously unseen semantic links. We present the architecture of the system and discuss its application potential.}, keywords = {Cultural heritage, IoT, personalization, Quality of Experience (QoE), Self-organizing exhibitions, semantics}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2017.10.038}, url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167739X17324093}, author = {Costas Vassilakis and Vassilis Poulopoulos and Angela Antoniou and Manolis Wallace and Giorgos Lepouras and Martin Lopez Nores} } @article {DBLP:journals/jbd/Chatzigeorgakidis18, title = {FML-kNN: scalable machine learning on Big Data using \emphk-nearest neighbor joins}, journal = {J. Big Data}, volume = {5}, year = {2018}, pages = {4}, doi = {10.1186/s40537-018-0115-x}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1186/s40537-018-0115-x}, author = {Georgios Chatzigeorgakidis and Sophia Karagiorgou and Spiros Athanasiou and Spiros Skiadopoulos} } @conference {angelantEuromed18, title = {The Human Computer Interaction and Virtual Reality Lab (University of Peloponnese): overview and current challenges}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the {\textquotedblleft}Cultural informatics research and applications: State of the art and open challenges{\textquotedblright} workshop, within the Euromed 2018 Conference}, year = {2018}, month = {oct}, abstract = {The Human-Computer Interaction and Virtual Reality Lab, at the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the University of Peloponnese, aims to conduct high quality research in areas related to the analysis, design, develop-ment, and evaluation of HCI and VR systems and applications, and in parallel to support the teaching requirements of the department in the respective field. Over the last years the HCI-VR lab particularly focuses on Cultural Heritage and de-velops technologies primarily for spaces of cultural heritage that cover the diverse needs of heterogeneous audiences providing holistic visitor experience. The HCI-VR lab is actively participating in National and European projects on Cultural Heritage, such as FP7 Experimedia (https://hci-vr.dit.uop.gr/experimedia), H2020 CrossCult (www.crosscult.eu) and multiple projects from the National Strategic Reference Framework.}, url = {http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2235/paper10.pdf}, author = {Angela Antoniou and Costas Vassilakis and Anastasios Theodoropoulos and Giorgos Lepouras} } @article {DBLP:journals/dke/AllamSK18, title = {Improved suffix blocking for record linkage and entity resolution}, journal = {Data Knowl. Eng.}, volume = {117}, year = {2018}, pages = {98{\textendash}113}, doi = {10.1016/j.datak.2018.07.005}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.datak.2018.07.005}, author = {Amin Allam and Spiros Skiadopoulos and Panos Kalnis} } @conference {DBLP:conf/edbt/Chatzigeorgakidis18, title = {Map-Based Visual Exploration of Geolocated Time Series}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshops of the EDBT/ICDT 2018 Joint Conference (EDBT/ICDT 2018), Vienna, Austria, March 26, 2018.}, year = {2018}, pages = {92{\textendash}99}, url = {http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2083/paper-14.pdf}, author = {Georgios Chatzigeorgakidis and Dimitrios Skoutas and Kostas Patroumpas and Spiros Athanasiou and Spiros Skiadopoulos} } @conference {vacilosEuromed18, title = {Personality Analysis of Social Media Influencers as a Tool for Cultural Institutions}, booktitle = {Digital Heritage. Progress in Cultural Heritage: Documentation, Preservation, and Protection}, year = {2018}, pages = {236{\textendash}247}, publisher = {Springer International Publishing}, organization = {Springer International Publishing}, abstract = {Nowadays, more and more cultural venues tend to utilize social media as a main tool for marketing, spreading their messages, engaging public and raising public awareness towards culture. It comes to a point where the massive of content in social media makes it a tedious procedure to contact the appropriate audience, the people that would really be stimulated by cultural information. In this notion, we assume that establishing conversations of high impact can possibly guide the cultural venues to audiences that can benefit more. These conversations usually include the so called influencers, users whose opinion can affect many people on social media; the latter usually referred to as followers. In this research paper we examine the characteristics of the influencers that can affect the procedures of a cultural venue on social media. The research is done within the scope of "CrossCult" EU funded project.}, keywords = {cultural informatics, influencers, personality traits, social media, user modeling}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-01762-0_20}, author = {Vassilis Poulopoulos and Costas Vassilakis and Angela Antoniou and Giorgos Lepouras and Manolis Wallace} } @article {Poulopoulos2018Heritage, title = {The personality of the influencers, the characteristics of qualitative discussions and their analysis for recommendations to cultural institutions}, journal = {Heritage}, volume = {1}, number = {2}, year = {2018}, month = {oct}, pages = {239-253}, abstract = {Social media usage is affecting peoples{\textquoteright} views through opinion sharing, a fact that has started to attract cultural institutions, as it is possible that this procedure can possibly be a part of a museum experience. As the main goal of a cultural institution is the maximization of senses stimulation, the device that is offered to the visitors{\textquoteright} hands everyday and every moment, becomes an important tool for the art spaces. In this notion we perform research on issues that can be of great importance for the museum{\textquoteright}s online presence and attraction. We focus on establishing the personality of influencers related to culture, as well as the characteristics of qualitative discussions on the social media. Crosscult Project is an EU funded project, that aims to spur a change in the way European citizens appraise History, and sets that basis of our research as the experiments are conducted within its scope of. Through the experimental procedure, we collect information in order to define the character of the influencer and the substances of a {\textquotedblleft}serious{\textquotedblright} conversation. {\textquotedblleft}Serious{\textquotedblright} conversations are regarded the ones in which a cultural organization can participate actively and benefit from the participation. We present the results of our experimental evaluation and analyze how cultural institutions can benefit from the outcomes of our research.}, keywords = {cultural informatics, digital humanities, personality traits, personalization, serious conversations, social media influencers, user modeling}, issn = {2571-9408}, doi = {10.3390/heritage1020016}, url = {https://doi.org/10.3390/heritage1020016}, author = {Vassilis Poulopoulos and Costas Vassilakis and Angela Antoniou and Giorgos Lepouras and Anastasios Theodoropoulos and Manolis Wallace} } @proceedings {DBLP:conf/edbt/2018w, title = {Proceedings of the Workshops of the EDBT/ICDT 2018 Joint Conference (EDBT/ICDT 2018), Vienna, Austria, March 26, 2018}, volume = {2083}, year = {2018}, publisher = {CEUR-WS.org}, url = {http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2083}, editor = {Nikolaus Augsten} } @conference {DBLP:conf/gis/Chatzigeorgakidis18, title = {Scalable hybrid similarity join over geolocated time series}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, SIGSPATIAL 2018, Seattle, WA, USA, November 06-09, 2018}, year = {2018}, pages = {119{\textendash}128}, doi = {10.1145/3274895.3274949}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3274895.3274949}, author = {Georgios Chatzigeorgakidis and Kostas Patroumpas and Dimitrios Skoutas and Spiros Athanasiou and Spiros Skiadopoulos} } @conference {DBLP:conf/pakdd/ChronisGAS18, title = {Unsupervised Disaggregation of Low Granularity Resource Consumption Time Series}, booktitle = {Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining - 22nd Pacific-Asia Conference, PAKDD 2018, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, June 3-6, 2018, Proceedings, Part II}, year = {2018}, pages = {558{\textendash}570}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-93037-4_44}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93037-4_44}, author = {Pantelis Chronis and Giorgos Giannopoulos and Spiros Athanasiou and Spiros Skiadopoulos} } @conference {DBLP:conf/ssdbm/AlGhamdiJSK17, title = {A Benchmark for Betweenness Centrality Approximation Algorithms on Large Graphs}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management, Chicago, IL, USA, June 27-29, 2017}, year = {2017}, pages = {6:1{\textendash}6:12}, doi = {10.1145/3085504.3085510}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3085504.3085510}, author = {Ziyad AlGhamdi and Fuad Jamour and Spiros Skiadopoulos and Panos Kalnis} } @conference {antoniouEuromed2017, title = {Experiences from the development of thematic itineraries in three Greek museums (Greek title: Εμπειρίες από την ανάπτυξη θεματικών διαδρομών σε τρία Ελληνικά μουσεία)}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2nd PanHellenic conference on Cultural Heritage (Euromed 2017)}, year = {2017}, month = {12}, abstract = {Private museums, as well as a considerable number of public regional museums, are confined by the small exhibition space and the relatively small number of exhibits and therefore cannot develop multiple exhibitions to satisfy visitors with different interests and characteristics. In this paper we report on our experieces from developing multiple thematic itineraries in the Tegea Folklore Museum , in the Cretan open-air museum "Lychnostatis" in Heraclion, and in the Panarcadic Archaeological Museum of Tripolis. The thematic itineraries in the Tegea Folklore Museum are (a) space (b) technology and (c) clothing. In the Cretan open-air museum "Lychnostatis", the itineraries are (a) natural sciences,(b) popular art, (c) pre-industrial technology and (d) folklore. In the Panarcadic Archaeological Museum of Tripolis we have the following itineraries: (a) appearance/clothing, (b) mortality, (c) nudity, (d) religion, (e) social status, (f) education, (g) healing practices and (h) everyday life. Each itinerary exploits a subset of the available exhibits to present a selected subject and is adapted to the needs of a predetermined and focused group of the general public. The results from the application of the approach, insofar, have shown that this is a promising path, both regarding the better exploitation of the space and the exhibits of the small museums, as well as regarding the better adaptation to the interests of the visitors.}, author = {Angela Antoniou and Costas Vassilakis and Manolis Wallace and Giorgos Lepouras and Vassilis Poulopoulos} } @conference {bourlakos-ikc17, title = {Formalization and visualization of the narrative for museum guides}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the third International KEYSTONE Conference (IKC2017)}, year = {2017}, month = {09}, publisher = {Springer}, organization = {Springer}, abstract = {There is a wide range of meta-data standards for the documentation of museum related information, such as CIDOC-CRM; these standards focus on the description of distinct exhibits. In contrast, there is a lack of standards for the digitization and documentation of the routes followed and information provided by museum guides. In this work we propose the notion of the narrative, which can be used to model a guided museum visit. We provide a formalization for the narrative so that it can be digitally encoded, and thus preserved, shared, re-used, further developed and exploited, and also propose an intuitive visualization approach.}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74497-1_1}, url = {https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-74497-1_1}, author = {Ioannis Bourlakos and Manolis Wallace and Angela Antoniou and Costas Vassilakis and Giorgos Lepouras and Anna Vassiliki Karapanagiotou} } @conference {DBLP:conf/gis/Chatzigeorgakidis17, title = {Indexing Geolocated Time Series Data}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, GIS 2017, Redondo Beach, CA, USA, November 7-10, 2017}, year = {2017}, pages = {19:1{\textendash}19:10}, doi = {10.1145/3139958.3140003}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3139958.3140003}, author = {Georgios Chatzigeorgakidis and Dimitrios Skoutas and Kostas Patroumpas and Spiros Athanasiou and Spiros Skiadopoulos} } @conference {theodorakopoulos-smap2017, title = {Personalized Augmented Reality Experiences in Museums using Google Cardboards}, booktitle = {2017 12th International Workshop on Semantic and Social Media Adaptation and Personalization (SMAP)}, year = {2017}, month = {07}, publisher = {IEEE CPS}, organization = {IEEE CPS}, abstract = {In this short paper we examine the suitability of the Google Cardboard as a means for the delivery of personalized cultural experiences. Specifically, we develop the content and create the application required in order to provide highly personalized visits to the Archaeological Museum in Tripolis, Greece. We also examine the usability issues related to the use of Google Cardboards. Early results are promising, and based on them we also outline the next steps ahead.}, doi = {10.1109/smap.2017.8022676}, url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8022676/}, author = {Marinos Theodorakopoulos and Nikos Papageorgopoulos and Andriana Mourti and Angela Antoniou and Manolis Wallace and Giorgos Lepouras and Costas Vassilakis and Nikos Platis} } @article {vassilakis-snam-2017a, title = {Stimulation of reflection and discussion in museum visits through the use of social media}, journal = {Social Network Analysis and Mining}, volume = {7}, number = {40}, year = {2017}, month = {12}, pages = {1-12}, publisher = {Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria}, abstract = {In this paper, we examine how social media can be linked to cultural heritage and in particular how we can incorporate games, social networks, history reflection and culture. More specifically, we explore the following aspects: (a) how social media sites can be integrated into the museum user experience (b) how user interactions within the social media, both within the context of the museum experience and outside it, can be exploited to enhance the quality of recommendations made to the users, (c) how trending topics from social media can be used to link museum exhibits with today{\textquoteright}s topics of interest and (d) how multi-level related terms extraction from social media data can lead to proposals for reflections to users. The end goal is to provide increased stimuli for users to study exhibits deeper and reflect on them, as well as to trigger discussion between the users, thus maximizing the impact of a museum visit.}, keywords = {big data, cognitive style, Communication, reflection, Social Networks, user profiling}, doi = {10.1007/s13278-017-0460-3}, url = {https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13278-017-0460-3}, author = {Costas Vassilakis and Angela Antoniou and Giorgos Lepouras and Vassilis Poulopoulos and Manolis Wallace and Stavroula Bampatzia and Ioannis Bourlakos} } @conference {vas-euromed16, title = {Interconnecting Objects, Visitors, Sites and (Hi)Stories Across Cultural and Historical Concepts: The CrossCult Project}, booktitle = {Digital Heritage. Progress in Cultural Heritage: Documentation, Preservation, and Protection}, year = {2016}, month = {10}, pages = {501{\textendash}510}, publisher = {Springer International Publishing}, organization = {Springer International Publishing}, abstract = {Human History, is a huge mesh of interrelated facts and concepts, spanning beyond borders, encompassing global aspects and finally constituting a shared, global experience. This is especially the case regarding European history, which is highly interconnected by nature; however, most History-related experiences that are today offered to the greater public, from schools to museums, are siloed. The CrossCult project aims to provide the means for offering citizens and cultural venue visitors a more holistic view of history, in the light of cross-border interconnections among pieces of cultural heritage, other citizens viewpoints and physical venues. To this end, the CrossCult project will built a comprehensive knowledge base encompassing information and semantic relationships across cultural information elements, and will provide the technological means for delivering the contents of this knowledge base to citizens and venue visitors in a highly personalized manner, creating narratives for the interactive experiences that maximise situational curiosity and serendipitous learning. The CrossCult platform will also exploit the cognitive/emotional profiles of the participants as well as temporal, spatial and miscellaneous features of context, including holidays and anniversaries, social media trending topics and so forth.}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-48496-9_39}, url = {http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-48496-9_39}, author = {Costas Vassilakis and Angela Antoniou and Giorgos Lepouras and Manolis Wallace and Ioanna Lykourentzou and Y. Naudet} } @conference {bampatzia-gala2016, title = {Serious games: Valuable Tools for Cultural Heritage}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2016 Games and Learning Alliance Conference}, year = {2016}, month = {12}, pages = {331{\textendash}341}, abstract = {Wishing to connect cultural heritage, games and social networks, the present work describes games to be used within the framework of a European H2020 project. For the purposes of supporting the museum visit, before, during and after, 5 games were designed for social networks to accomplish user profil-ing, to promote the museum and the application through social network dissemi-nation, to introduce museum items and themes and to also function as visit sou-venirs. The games are also presented in a generic framework for games in cultural heritage, which has been used successfully in the past.}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50182-6_30}, url = {https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-50182-6_30}, author = {Stavroula Bampatzia and Ioannis Bourlakos and Angela Antoniou and Costas Vassilakis and Giorgos Lepouras and Manolis Wallace} } @conference {bampatzia2016a, title = {The use of semantics in the CrossCult H2020 project}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the second International KEYSTONE Conference, (IKC2016)}, year = {2016}, pages = {190{\textendash}195}, abstract = {CrossCult is a newly started project that aims to make reflective history a reality in the European cultural context. In this paper we examine how the project aims to take advantage of advances in semantic technologies in order to achieve its goals. Specifically, we see what the quest for reflection is and, through practical examples from two of the project{\textquoteright}s flagship pilots, explain how semantics can assist in this direction}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53640-8_17}, url = {https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-53640-8_17}, author = {Stavroula Bampatzia and Omar Gustavo Bravo-Quezada and Angela Antoniou and Martin Lopez Nores and Manolis Wallace and Giorgos Lepouras and Costas Vassilakis} } @conference {bampatzia-smap16, title = {Using Social media to stimulate history reflection in cultural heritage}, booktitle = {Proceedings of Semantic and Social Media Adaptation and Personalization (SMAP) 2016}, year = {2016}, month = {10}, abstract = {CrossCult H2020 is a European project, the aim of which is the reflection of history in a cultural setting. In this paper, we describe how social media can be linked to cultural heritage and in particular how we can incorporate games, social networks, history reflection and culture. The paper presents the case study of one of the project pilots, to show how history reflection can be enhanced with the use of social networks.}, doi = {10.1109/SMAP.2016.7753390}, url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7753390/}, author = {Stavroula Bampatzia and Angela Antoniou and Giorgos Lepouras and Costas Vassilakis and Manolis Wallace} } @conference {DBLP:conf/bigdataconf/Chatzigeorgakidis15, title = {A MapReduce based k-NN joins probabilistic classifier}, booktitle = {2015 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2015, Santa Clara, CA, USA, October 29 - November 1, 2015}, year = {2015}, pages = {952{\textendash}957}, doi = {10.1109/BigData.2015.7363844}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1109/BigData.2015.7363844}, author = {Georgios Chatzigeorgakidis and Sophia Karagiorgou and Spiros Athanasiou and Spiros Skiadopoulos} } @article {DBLP:journals/pvldb/ElseidyASK14, title = {GRAMI: Frequent Subgraph and Pattern Mining in a Single Large Graph}, journal = {PVLDB}, volume = {7}, number = {7}, year = {2014}, pages = {517{\textendash}528}, doi = {10.14778/2732286.2732289}, url = {http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol7/p517-elseidy.pdf}, author = {Mohammed Elseidy and Ehab Abdelhamid and Spiros Skiadopoulos and Panos Kalnis} } @proceedings {DBLP:conf/edbt/2014, title = {Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Extending Database Technology, EDBT 2014, Athens, Greece, March 24-28, 2014}, year = {2014}, publisher = {OpenProceedings.org}, url = {http://openproceedings.org/html/pages/2014_edbt.html}, editor = {Sihem Amer-Yahia and Vassilis Christophides and Anastasios Kementsietsidis and Minos N. Garofalakis and Stratos Idreos and Vincent Leroy} } @conference {lep14a, title = {Towards a Learning Analytics Platform for Supporting the Educational Process}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Information, Intelligence, Systems \& Application (IISA2014)}, year = {2014}, month = {7}, abstract = {In this paper, we present the vision of an open source learning analytics platform, able to harvest data from different sources, including e-learning platforms and environments, registrar{\textquoteright}s information systems, alumni systems, etc., so as to provide all stakeholders with the necessary functionality to make decisions on the learning process. The platform{\textquoteright}s architecture is modular, allowing the introduction of new functionality or connection to new systems to collect needed data. All data can be analyzed and presented though interactive visualizations to find correlations between metrics, to make predictions for students or student groups, to identify best practices for instructors and let them explore {\textquoteright}what-if{\textquoteright} scenarios, to offer students personalized recommendations and personalized detailed feedback, etc. Our objective is to inform and empower all stakeholders to improve the learning experience.}, doi = {10.1109/IISA.2014.6878750}, url = {http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6878750/}, author = {Giorgos Lepouras and Akrivi Katifori and Costas Vassilakis and Angela Antoniou and Nikos Platis} } @conference {masie2013, title = {Improving museum visitors{\textquoteright} Quality of Experience through intelligent recommendations: A visiting style-based approach}, booktitle = {Proceedings of MASIE 2013 Workshop, co-located with the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Environments IE{\textquoteright}13}, year = {2013}, month = {7}, address = {Athens, GR}, abstract = {This paper investigates the effect that smart routing and recommendations can have on improving the Quality of Experience of museum visitors. The novelty of our approach consists of taking into account not only user interests but also their visiting styles, as well as modeling the museum not as a sterile space but as a location where crowds meet and interact, impacting each visitor?s Quality of Experience. The investigation is done by an empirical study on data gathered by a custom-made simulator tailored for the museum user routing problem. Results are promising and future potential and directions are discussed.}, doi = {10.3233/978-1-61499-286-8-507}, author = {Ioanna Lykourentzou and Claude, X. and Y. Naudet and Tobias, E. and Angela Antoniou and Giorgos Lepouras and Costas Vassilakis} } @article {antoniou13x, title = {A methodology for the design of online exhibitions}, journal = {DESIDOC Journal of Library and Information Technology}, volume = {33}, number = {3}, year = {2013}, pages = {158{\textendash}167}, abstract = {The process of designing systems or products largely depends on a number of decisions, like {\textquotedblleft}who do I design for?{\textquotedblright}, {\textquotedblleft}what should my product do?{\textquotedblright}, {\textquotedblleft}what are the user requirements?{\textquotedblright} etc. The developing teams usually base their decisions on experience and/or heuristics and this is particularly the case, in the development of online products and especially online exhibitions. The different solutions are frequently case studies of specific museums or institutions that wish to provide online content to actual or possible visitors. In addition, the interdisciplinary nature of the endeavor, involving museology, technology but also education, poses important design problems. In the following sections, we present a generic methodology for the design of online exhibitions, using top-down processes and transferable findings across museum types that wish to assist the designers during the early decision stages. This paper provides an introduction to the field, emphasising its interdisciplinary nature and reviews related work in the area of online exhibition design. It also presents an overview of the methodology, elaborating on the individual methodology steps; in particular, the processes for determining the visitors{\textquoteright} perception of the museum (degree of museumness); the museum needs that require to be supported; the educational approach to be adopted; the relevance to life-long learning activities; the approach to adaptivity; and user involvement have been reviewed.}, author = {Angela Antoniou and Giorgos Lepouras and Costas Vassilakis} } @conference {gala2013, title = {User Profiling: Towards a Facebook Game that Reveals Cognitive Style}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the GALA 2013 conference}, year = {2013}, month = {10}, pages = {349{\textendash}353}, address = {Paris, FR}, abstract = {This paper presents an innovative approach based on social-network gaming, which will extract players? cognitive styles for personalization purposes. Cognitive styles describe the way individuals think, perceive and remember information and can be exploited to personalize user interaction. Questionnaires are usually employed to identify cognitive styles, a tedious process for most users. Our approach relies on a Facebook game for discovering potential visitors? cognitive styles with an ultimate goal of enhancing the overall visitors{\textquoteright} experience in the museum. By hosting such a game on the museum?s webpage and on Facebook, the museum aims to attract new visitors, as well as to support the user profiling process.}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-12157-4_28}, author = {Angela Antoniou and Ioanna Lykourentzou and Rompa, J. and Tobias, E. and Giorgos Lepouras and Costas Vassilakis and Y. Naudet} } @article {DBLP:journals/corr/abs-1109-6884, title = {ERA: Efficient Serial and Parallel Suffix Tree Construction for Very Long Strings}, journal = {CoRR}, volume = {abs/1109.6884}, year = {2011}, url = {http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.6884}, author = {Essam Mansour and Amin Allam and Spiros Skiadopoulos and Panos Kalnis} } @article {DBLP:journals/pvldb/MansourASK11, title = {ERA: Efficient Serial and Parallel Suffix Tree Construction for Very Long Strings}, journal = {PVLDB}, volume = {5}, number = {1}, year = {2011}, pages = {49{\textendash}60}, doi = {10.14778/2047485.2047490}, url = {http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol5/p049_essammansour_vldb2012.pdf}, author = {Essam Mansour and Amin Allam and Spiros Skiadopoulos and Panos Kalnis} } @conference {538, title = {Pricing Information Goods in Distributed Agent-based Information Filtering}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS)}, year = {2011}, month = {October}, address = {Crete, Greece}, author = {Christos Tryfonopoulos and Laura Maria Andreescu} } @conference {Akim2011a, title = {Spreading Activation for Web Scale Reasoning: Promise and Problems}, booktitle = {WebSci 11, poster presentation}, year = {2011}, month = {6}, pages = {1-4}, abstract = {Various forms of spreading activation has been used in a number of web systems, not least in the PageRank algorithm. In our own work we have been using this as a technique for managing context over small and large ontologies, and both our own work and that in LarKC suggests that spreading activation has the potential to aid in reasoning over web-scale data sets including the growing set of linked open data resources. Of particular importance is that spreading activation can be applied locally to a dynamic selfselecting working set of an (practically) unbound linked data collection, as well as globally to the entire collection. However, this potential does not come without problems, some concerning the nature of the algorithm on any large data set, and some more to do with the particular nature of linked open data.}, author = {Nazihah Md. Akim and Alan Dix and Akrivi Katifori and Giorgos Lepouras and Nadeem Shabir and Costas Vassilakis} } @conference {wallace11a, title = {Supporting User Roles in Ontology Fuzzification}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Semantic media adaptation and personalization (SMAP)}, year = {2011}, month = {dec}, publisher = {IEEE Computer Society}, organization = {IEEE Computer Society}, abstract = {Manual ontology development is clearly a strenuous task. Whilst a variety of ontological engineering methodologies exist, their actual application is far from trivial, mainly due to the widely diverse nature of the tasks involved. In this work we study these tasks and identify the different types of human experts that are best suited to perform each one. As a result, we present a cooperative version of an ontological engineering methodology, together with a graphical tool that supports it.}, keywords = {domain expert, fuzzification, knowledge engineer, ontology development, user roles}, doi = {10.1109/smap.2011.24}, url = {https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/smap/2011/4524/00/4524a057.pdf}, author = {Manolis Wallace and Panos Alexopoulos and Ioannis Papafragkos and Costas Vassilakis} } @article {antoniou11, title = {Towards a methodological framework for the cognitive-behavioural evaluation of educational e-games}, journal = {International Journal of Learning Technology}, volume = {6}, number = {3}, year = {2011}, pages = {263{\textendash}287}, abstract = {The proposed methodological framework reviews and uses knowledge from the field of cognitive psychology in order to evaluate aspects of educational games. In particular, we concentrate on two components of human cognition that play a central role to learning, namely memory and motivation. After having reviewed theories in the field, we created a questionnaire in order to evaluate educational games. The questionnaire incorporates different experimental findings of cognitive psychology. Especially, we have applied Maslow{\textquoteright}s motivation theory, Behavioural findings on reinforcement, experimental findings about attention and memory. We present the results obtained from the evaluation of two games, PAC-MAN and Mega Jump. The results confirmed the user ratings of the two games, showing that there seem to be cognitive reasons for the success/failure of different games. Finally, lists of guidelines for developers and instructors are included.}, doi = {10.1504/11.43580}, author = {Angela Antoniou and Dimitris Diakakis and Giorgos Lepouras and Costas Vassilakis} } @conference {562, title = {EverLast: A Distributed Architecture for Preserving the Web}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL)}, year = {2009}, month = {June}, address = {Austin, Texas}, author = {Avishek Anand and Srikanta Bedathur and Klaus Berberich and Ralf Schenkel and Christos Tryfonopoulos} } @inbook {lep2007a, title = {Encyclopedia of Digital Government}, year = {2007}, pages = {1413{\textendash}1417}, publisher = {IGI Publishing}, organization = {IGI Publishing}, chapter = {Reusability In Governmental Electronic Services}, abstract = {Reusability is the degree to which a software component or other work can be used in more than one programs or software systems. e-Government is a prosperous area for the application of reusability, since the services offered to citizens from the same administration, or even different administrations, have common portions that can be developed only once and reused wherever appropriate. In this paper we present the design and implementation of an electronic service development environment which offers the potential to reuse components that have already been implemented, for the realization of new services.}, doi = {10.4018/978-1-59140-789-8.ch216}, author = {Giorgos Lepouras and Costas Vassilakis}, editor = {Ari-Veikko Anttiroiko and Matti Malkia} } @inbook {vas2007a, title = {Encyclopedia of Digital Government}, year = {2007}, pages = {1174{\textendash}1179}, publisher = {IGI Publishing}, organization = {IGI Publishing}, chapter = {The Lifecycle Of Transactional Services}, abstract = {Transactional services are an indispensible part of e-government, since provision of services to citizens and enterprises,as well as the interaction between the government and citizens-enterprises are modelled mainly through such services. Latest quantifications, however, show that the development of such services lags behind as compared both to the expectations of citizens-enterprises and to the efforts made by governments. This can be attributed, amongst other reasons, to the "traditional" approach to electronic service development, which treats each electronic service as an isolated software project. In this paper, we propose an e-service development platform, which covers the whole lifecycle of transactional services and facilitates the analysis, development, deployment and maintenance of these services.}, doi = {10.4018/978-1-59140-789-8.ch177}, author = {Costas Vassilakis and Giorgos Lepouras}, editor = {Ari-Veikko Anttiroiko and Matti Malkia} } @article {Maroulis2004267, title = {A web browser for ISDN card phones}, journal = {Journal of Internet Technology}, volume = {5}, number = {3}, year = {2004}, note = {cited By (since 1996) 1}, pages = {267-277}, abstract = {In order to cover the ever-increasing need for more direct and easy access to information, new information access means need to be devised or existing ones need to be further exploited. In this paper, we present a mini Web Browser for ISDN card phones, which enables this widespread device to be used for accessing information in the World Wide Web. The implemented web browser supports HTML and WML pages, while special care was taken to tackle the limitations imposed by the ISDN card phone{\textquoteright}s hardware, such as small screen, limited keyboard, scarce processing and memory resources. One of the techniques employed to increase the capabilities of the ISDN card phone browser was the introduction of a proxy server, which transforms demanding media types to formats that can be handled by the ISDN card phone hardware.}, keywords = {Bandwidth, Costs, Embedded systems, HTML, Information analysis, Integrated multiprotocol, ISDN card phone, Laptop computers, Mobile phones, Personal computers, Personal digital assistants, Proxy servers, Voice/data communication systems, Web browsers}, url = {http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.0-4344632311\&partnerID=40\&md5=9242e761d5eedb61880ca004cdaa873d}, author = {Maroulis, D. and Aronis, S. and Nassiapoulou, V. and Grammenos, N. and Costas Vassilakis} } @article {577, title = {Selective Information Dissemination in P2P Networks: Problems and Solutions}, journal = {SIGMOD Record, Special Issue on Peer-to-Peer Data Management}, volume = {32}, year = {2003}, pages = {71-76}, author = {Manolis Koubarakis and Christos Tryfonopoulos and Stratos Idreos and Yannis Drougas}, editor = {Karl Aberer} }