<b>Greece</b>: The Strongest Points of Greek Culture, and the State Cultural Policy

Stefanos Kollias was born in Athens in 1956. He obtained the Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 1979, the M.Sc. in Communication Engineering from the University of Manchester in England in 1980, the Ph.D in Signal Processing from the Computer Science Division of NTUA in 1984. In 1982 he was given a COMSOC Scholarship by the IEEE Communication Society. Since 1986 he has served as Lecturer, Assistant and Associate Professor of the ECE Department of NTUA. From 1987 to 1988 he was a Visiting Research Scientist in the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Center for Telecommunications Research of Columbia University in New York. Since 1997 he is Professor of NTUA and Director of the Intelligent Multimedia Systems Lab. His research interests include multimedia analysis, retrieval, semantic web and knowledge technologies, human computer interaction, multimodal emotion recognition, artificial intelligence, neural networks, interoperability and metadata of cultural content. He has published more than 200 papers, 100 of which in international journals. He is editor of the book ?Multimedia Content and the Semantic Web?, Wiley, 2005. He has been Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, on Multimedia & of the Neural Networks Journal. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the European Neural Network Society, 2007-today. He has been General Chair of the VLBV01 (Intl. Workshop on Multimedia Analysis), of the ICANN-06 (Intl. Conf. Neural Networks) and of CBMI-09 (Content-based Multimedia Indexing). He has been National Representative in the EC Group on Cultural Heritage (2004-2007) and in the Member State Expert Group on CH (2007-today).

George Bolanis was born in Athens, 1956. He studied Civil and Transportation Engineering in the National Technical University of Athens in Greece from 1974 to 1979. He received an M.Sc in Transportation Management from the Polytechnic Institute of New York, USA in 1981. He worked in the private sector from 1984 to 2002, serving as Communications and Direct Marketing Director of IBM Hellas SA (1990-1997), and Business Development Manager of Labrakis Press (1999- 2001). From 2002 to 2006 he was a consultant in the National Bank of Greece. Since 2006 he has been Managing Director of the Hellenic National Audiovisual Archive. For the last three years he has been National Representative in the EC Member State Expert Group on Digitisation.