On the one side, there is culture: all the technical and intellectual achievements of humanity – A stimulus for the senses (tangible and intangible works of art), a springboard for the mind and soul (values, education), the salt of life (customs and traditions, aesthetics). And on the other side, there is informatics: the science that studies the foundations and nature of information, algorithms, and computations, and the technologies that embed these into computing systems. Culture is formed in the past and is experienced by people in the present while it continues to evolve. Informatics is advancing in the present while it envisions the future. What kind of relationship could these two ever have? In this discussion, we will touch upon the meeting points of these two major poles, focusing especially on new experiences of culture that are made possible by informatics.

Speaker:
Yannis Ioannidis, Professor, President, General Director, “Athena” RC

Organisation: Ερευνητικό Κέντρο “Αθηνά”

Yannis Ioannidis (PhD, UC Berkeley, 1986 – MSc, Harvard University, 1983 – Diploma, National Technical University of Athens, 1982) is the President and General Director of the “Athena” Research and Innovation Center as well as a Professor at the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the University of Athens. His research interests include Database and Information Systems, Personalization and Social Networks, Data Science, Human-Computer Interaction, Electronic Infrastructures, and several Application Areas (Life Sciences, Cultural Heritage, Biodiversity, Physical Sciences), topics on which he has published over 150 articles in leading journals and conferences and he also holds three patents. He has been a (co-
)coordinator of all the OpenAIRE projects and a partner in many other research
projects, including CHESS, Plato’s Academy, and the Human Brain Project. Prof. Ioannidis is an ACM and IEEE Fellow, a member of Academia Europaea, and a recipient of several research and teaching awards. He has also served as the Chair of ACM SIGMOD, the international association of researchers on data management. He is the Greek delegate to the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) and the ESFRI representative to the e-Infrastructures Reflection Group (e- IRG).