• Demetris F. Lekkas, University of the Aegean, Greece (http://www.env.aegean.gr/staff/teaching-staff/demetris-lekkas/)

Dr Demetris Francis Lekkas (male) is Associate Professor in the Department of Environment (University of the Aegean, Greece). He is the Director of the Waste Management Laboratory and leader of the Analysis and Simulation of Environmental Systems research group. He holds a PhD in Hydrology from Imperial College London (UK). From 2002 to 2004 he worked as research assistant at Imperial College London on single-site continuous rainfall modelling – part of the DEFRA (UK) funded project “Improved Methods for National Spatial – Temporal Rainfall and Evaporation Modelling for BSM (Broad Scale Modelling)”. His research interests include Water resources analysis and simulation, catchment hydrology, analysis and evaluation of hydrological, model identification and evaluation, development of tools for water quantity and quality management, time series analysis and extreme values estimation, droughts and climate change impacts assessment, integrated waste management, composting, circular economy and eco-effectiveness. Dr Lekkas has participated in numerous EU and Greek projects and published more than 60 scientific papers. Moreover, he is the chairman of the International Conference on Environmental Science and Technology (CEST), a biennial conference held since 1989 (the biggest environmental conference in Greece) and executive director of Global NEST Journal. Current research activity includes the coordination of the project “Geo-Ergon Paideia: Start Up Farm: Skills for future eco-farmers (funded under the Erasmus+ programme), the coordination of projects associated with Municipal Solid Waste Management in Greece (funded by Greek municipalities) and the participation in the Research Infrastructure «ENIRISST: Intelligent Research Infrastructure for Shipping, Supply chain, Transport and Logistics” (funded by Greek General Secretariat for Research and Technology). Recently he was appointed as a member of the Board of Research and Innovation of the North Aegean Region.

• Manolis Maragoudakis, University of the Aegean, Greece (http://www.icsd.aegean.gr/mmarag/)

Manolis Maragoudakis is an Asssistant Professor at the Department of Information and Communication Systems Engineering at the University of the Aegean with “Data Mining” as a field of exprertise. Furthermore, he is the Departmental Coordinator for the Programme LLP/Erasmus within the University of the Aegean.

He holds a PhD from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Patras and a diploma in Computer Science from the Computer Science Department of the University of Crete. His thesis was entitled “Reasoning under uncertainty in dialogue and other natural language systems using Bayesian network techniques”.

• Ilias Pechlivanidis, Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI), Sweden (http://www.pechlivanidis-hydro.com/)

Dr Ilias Pechlivanidis is a senior researcher at the hydrology research unit of SMHI. He is an expert in identification and evaluation of hydrological models under uncertainty and has about 15 years of experience in hydrologic/hydraulic research. He is the Associate Editor in Hydrology and Water Resources in the Global NEST journal, a Guest Editor at two special issues in the Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (HESS) journal, invited/guest lecturer (>20), and has organised and convened international workshops and conferences (>10). He has been the project leader in European and international projects at SMHI, focusing on short to medium-range and seasonal hydrological forecasting, calibration of large scale multi-basin hydrological models, and assessment of environmental change on hydrology and water resources. He has been leading the development/improvement of the application of the HYPE hydrological model in the Indian subcontinent, and the group’s scientific investigations on hydrological forecasting. He is currently a WP-leader in the EU H2020 SPACE-O project, and the coordinator of the VR WaterRain-Him project.

• Charalampos (Harris) Alexopoulos, University of the Aegean, Greece (https://www.linkedin.com/in/xalexopoulos/)

Harris holds a PhD diploma from the Department of Information and Communications Systems Engineering at the University of the Aegean on open data infrastructures, IS evaluation, interoperability and e-government. He is an Adjunct Professor in the same department (4th year pregraduate course of e-government: applications and technologies). He is also a Research Associate in the Information Systems Laboratory of the same department, working on European and National funded research and pilot application projects (ENGAGE, SHARE-PSI 2.0, EU-COMMUNITY, PADGETS, NOMAD, NET-EUCEN, PLUG-IN) for governments and enterprises. In parallel, Harris is responsible for the International Relations of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Unit of the University, coordinating collaboration activities. He serves as Programme and Organisation Committee Member of the annual Samos Summit on ICT-enabled Governance. He is also a constant Programme and Organisation Committee Member of the “Open & Collaborative Governance” and “Big Data Analysis on Earth Sciences” summer schools.

Harris is a computer science graduate from the University of Peloponnese with an MSc in Management Information Systems from the University of the Aegean. In 2015, Harris was ranked as one of the most prolific researchers in open data research worldwide by Hossain, Dwivedi and Rana (2015). He was a 2011 nominee (10 out of 649) from the Students Excellence Awards in Greece and he won the 1st place in WeGov 2010 Awards in the category of best idea within the PCI 2010 14th panhellenic conference on informatics with the "Public Services Transformation Methodology: 40 steps to restructure the state". He took the 2nd place in WeGov 2011 Awards in the category of best application, with 4-Delta Application: Production and Management of Public Sector Evaluation Procedures.

• Konstantinos Mammas, Advanced Analytics & Artificial Intelligence Consultant - Accenture The Dock (Ireland)

Kostas Kostas is a Data Scientist in Accenture (Ireland) - the Dock unit. He holds a MSc degree in Statistics and Actuarial Financial Mathematics from University of Aegean and a Specialization title in Big Data Analytics from Athens University of Economics and Business. 

He has experience in the areas of Big Data, Marketing, Banking and Healthcare analytics and the last 5 years worked extensively as an RnD scientific programmer in solving real world problems using Big Data technologies.