Aegean Startups: Training Entrepreneurs in Samos and Lemnos

Within May 2014, the Information Systems Lab performed two 5-day seminars in Samos and Lemnos islands, training entrepreneurs and company executives on "Management and Information Technology for Small and Medium Entreprises".

More than 50 entrepreneurs, instructors from the University of the AEGEAN and the private sector discussed hot issues on management and ICT, in a programme that spanned in 10 days.  Main issues in the agenda where:

• Business Planning 
• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems
• Retail Systems 
• Business Financials
• Innovation Management in SME's
• New forms of entreprising in the agricultural and tourism sectors
• Case Studies: Existing business plans from agri-touristic enterprises and startups

Students of the pre-graduate and post-graduate programmes, presented innovative business plans on:

• Herbs collection and marketing 
• Wine-tourism
• University Startup Incubator (AEGEAN Startups)

... and mobile application prototypes, on:

• Karlovassi Touristic Points
• Technology News RSS Reader
• Startups information gathering and presentation
• VAT number validation for enterprises in all EU member states
• Social-media based notes distribution

From the training seminar in Samos (Day 5)

From the training seminar in Lemnos (Day 2)

More information and relative material (in Greek) can be found at:

http://samosbiz.blogspot.com

http://lemnosbiz.blogspot.com

The ENGAGE Open Data Hackathon / Datathon launch

ENGAGE Open Data Hackathon / Datathon 

Presentation Tutorial

Tuesday, 15 April 2014, 9:00‐14:30

Organiser: ENGAGE project consortium 

Host: Microsoft Innovation Center‐Greece 

Kifissias 221 Marousi 151 24 

Competition description

This is a “hybrid” Hackathon‐Datathon competition organised by the ENGAGE FP7 Project. Applicants will have the opportunity to register for the competition and then submit their entries, which  can be open‐data‐centric applications and/or innovative,  curated and re‐usable high‐quality datasets. All applicants must conform to the Eligibility Criteria stated below and all entries will be assessed based on the Selection Criteria. A panel of judges appointed by the ENGAGE consortium will assess the entries and decide on a winner and runner‐up for the Hackathon and the Datathon.

Event details 

Hackathon launch: Monday 7th April 2014 

Deadline for submissions: Monday  28th April 2014 

Winners are announced: Monday 5th May 2014 

Agenda (Invitations and presentations in English) 

Tuesday, 15 April, 2014 

09:00‐11:00  Plenary Session @ The Stage – Chair  – Fotis Karayannis, Microsoft
Innovation Center Greece  (MIC‐GR)

09:00‐09:30  Arrival – Coffee
09:30‐10:00  Open Data – George Kanellopoulos,  Senior Technology Evangelist,  Microsoft Hellas
10:00‐10:30  Open Data Initiatives in Greece– Prof. Yannis
Charalabidis, University of the Aegean

10:30‐11:00  The ENGAGE Platform – Spiros Mouzakitis (including
short live demo), ENGAGE project manager, National Technical University of
Athens

11:00 ‐11:30  Coffee Break  

11:30‐13:00  Parallel Session –Training for developers @ The Stage – Chair  – Spiros
Mouzakitis, NTUA

11:30‐12:00  Microsoft Related tools ‐ The Microsoft Business Intelligence / Power Business Intelligence ‐  Thodoris Theodorou, Senior Consultant, Microsoft Services, Microsoft Hellas
 
12:00‐12:30  The ENGAGE API, Sotiris Koussouris, ENGAGE Technical Manager, NTUA

12:30‐13:00  Application examples using the ENGAGE API– Naim Gaberlo, MIC‐GR

11:30‐13:00  Parallel Session – ENGAGE Training for journalists and data analysts @
The Factory– Chair  – Evangelos Argyzoudis, Intrasoft International

11:30‐12:00  The ENGAGE curation and visualization tools, Harris Alexopoulos, AEGEAN

12:00‐12:30  Examples of the ENGAGE usage for data curation or creation of new datasets, Evangelos Argyzoudis, INTRASOFT International S.A.

12:30‐13:00  Available datasets and success stories (transport, health, political sciences, legal, etc.), Evangelos Argyzoudis, INTRASOFT International S.A.

13:00 ‐14:00  Light Lunch Break  

14:00‐14:15  Plenary Session‐ MIC start‐up support efforts, Lydia Morazzani, Business
Operation Manager, Microsoft Innovation Center Greece

14:15‐14:30  Plenary Session – Wrap‐up and procedure for submitting applications
using the ENGAGE portal‐ Spiros Mouzakitis, ENGAGE project
coordination team, NTUA

14:30 End of the event


More information at: www.engagedata.eu | www.engage‐project.eu  

SHARE PSI 2.0 : A new project on Open Data started

Share-PSI 2.0 is a new CIP/PSP project, bringing together a critical mass of government agencies and organisations responsible for implementing the new Public Sector Information (PSI) Directive.

Lead by the W3C, the consortium includes the Open Group and Open Geospatial Consortium as fellow standards bodies plus the PSI Alliance, Open Knowledge Foundation, Open Data Institute and PwC as the primary contractor in the ISA Programme's work on interoperability. Each of these represents a community with an interest in standards for commerce, overnment and citizen-lead activity, however, Share-PSI goes much further. 16 government agencies with direct responsibility for defining and implementing an open data strategy are included in the network, covering 14 countries. Another 21 academic bodies and SMEs with a direct role in advising and implementing the PSI Directive take the tally of countries covered to 25 plus Russia.

The network will proceed via a series of 5 workshops on different themes related to the implementation of the new PSI Directive. Partners will contribute case studies of relevant work done, successful or otherwise; each workshop will include external participants selected on the basis of submitted position papers, and will generate a standalone report. The inputs and outputs from each workshop will be aggregated into a single best practices document that, through an independent process, may become a recognised W3C standard. Importantly, this document will be localised in each of the countries covered by the network. Localisation will cover language(s) but, more importantly, it will refer to the specific implementation methods that apply in those countries. For example, how to contact a specific national or city-wide data portal, which controlled vocabularies should be used, which licence(s) is/are appropriate and so on. The result will be country-specific guidance on implementing a harmonised approach to implementation of the PSI Directive on open data across at least a majority of European countries.

University of the AEGEAN / Information Systems Laboratory, is a partner in the project, with the responsibility of organising the 1st SHARE PSI 2.0 International Workshop on Open Data, in conjunction with the 5th Samos Summit on ICT-enabled Governance.

An overview of the SHARE PSI 2.0 Network

Visit to Georgia, talking on eGovernment reform and interoperability

At the end of November 2013 I visited Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, invited by the Ministry of Justice to talk on Government Interoperability issues at the National ICT conference.  

GITI 2013  (Georgian ICT Development and Cyber Security Event) was held in Sheraton Hotel in Tbilisi, gathering a nice mix of local officials, ICT companies and international eGov experts. My presention was about interoperability issues in Governments, especially prescribing the strategy and contents for a National Interoperability Framework in Georgia. You can see my presentation here.

Georgia is a country with a rich history and tradition, located between Caucasus moutain and the black sea.

Two parts of the country (see map), namely South Ossetia and Abkhazia,  are under Russian control, since the latest military disputes in 1991 and 2008.

One can still see reminiscents of the 2008 bombings of military bases, in the mountains outside Tbilisi.

Tbilisi at sunset

Outside Svetitskhoveli Cathedral. Mtskheta

During my stay I also had the chance to meet and collaborate with the Greek Embassy (very energetic) commercial attache, who had the courtesy to introduce me to some representatives of the local business community. 

Then, with my local taxi driver (who had previously spent a couple of years in Greece and could speek Greek quite well) we managed to visit some places in Tbilisi and the old capital outside Tbilisi. 

The Georgian National Museum is certainly a place to get the key facts about the country's history.  Among other exhibitions, the museum also hosts the Museum of Soviet Occupation, providing facts for the sometimes extremely harsh period between 1921 and 1991.

Mtskheta, the old capital, viewed from the monastery of the Cross

Mtskheta, te capital of the country until 17th century,  is a well preserved and partially restored old city dating several centuries ago, located a few miles to the north of Tbilisi.  the most important place to see is the UNESCO-accredited complex of the old city and the prestigious cathedral, dating back to 13th century.

Changing the way policies are designed, decided and enforced…

an interview with NOMAD Coordinator Prof. Yannis Charalabidis

(from the NOMAD project newsletter)

Dr. Yannis Charalabidis is Ass. Professor in the University of the Aegean, in the area of eGovernance Information Systems, coordinating policy making, research and pilot application projects for governments and enterprises worldwide. A computer engineer with a PhD in complex information systems, he has been employed for several years as an executive director in Singular IT Group, leading software development and company expansion in Europe, India and the US. He writes and teaches on Government Service Systems, Enterprise Interoperability, Government Transformation and Citizen Participation.

Could you please tell us a few words about the FP 7 subject area of the Nomad Project?

NOMAD is a research project under the area of “ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling”, which addresses the challenges of empowerment of citizens and increase transparency through the utilization of ICT tools to support decision-making. The key research question of this theme, paving the wave to Digital Science, is how ICT can transform governance and policy making combining crowdsourcing techniques with data mining functionalities and advanced methods of modeling and simulation, with the objective of achieving open and collaborative governance.

What is the 2013 Samos summit?

The project has recently co-organized the fourth “Samos 2013 Summit onDigital Innovation for Government, Business and Society”, which was held in the island of Samos in Greece, on July 1 – 5, 2013.  During the Summit, in which more than 100 high caliber research, administrations and enterprises experts from 20 countries have participated, new actions and guidelines for ICT in the context of the Digital Agenda and the new Framework Programme HORIZON 2020 were presented. In addition, more than 15 international research projects, among them NOMAD, showcased their proposals and shared ideas for new online services and tools for policy-making and e-participation.

NOMAD had also the chance to exchange ideas with younger members of the research community, the students of the 1st International Summer School on Open and Collaborative Governance held in conjunction with the Samos 2013 Summit, to whom project tutorials were provided.

Can you please describe Nomad in a few and simple words?

The project aims to introduce into the policy-making process an array of new techniques and opportunities emerging through the massive use of the social web. Therefore, it will deliver to decision-makers a comprehensive environment for content search, acquisition, classification and visualization that will enable them understand citizens’ opinion, arguments and needs as expressed in Web 2.0 and affect their policy-making agenda. NOMAD’s vision can be summarized in “changing the way policies are designed, decided and enforced”. To achieve this, NOMAD develops an innovative toolset employing techniques on data and opinion mining and the AI/ philosophy concerning the conceptual representation of policies and the argumentation theories.

Why is such a project interesting for the Aegean University?

AEGEAN University is a research organization with high expertise in Policy Modeling, Data Mining, Evaluation Models and in general in the ICT-enabled governance area. Therefore, is

interested in accumulating and expanding the knowledge that will stem from the project through academic work and as well, disseminating NOMAD results in the scientific community

.

Are there many RTD projects around use of social media in policy-making, what is the specificity of Nomad?

There are some other projects that exploit the power of Social Media in the policy-making arena, for example PADGETS, WeGov, +Spaces, FUPOL etc. However, what differentiates NOMAD from is what is called “non-moderated crowdsourcing”, meaning that it searches on the Web places where users have been expressed without any stimulation and collects massive amounts of data. In addition content retrieved is correlated with specific components of policy proposal as depicted in the policy model that the NOMAD user authors.

What do you consider as a break-through innovation in the development of the project so far?

NOMAD, has so far released the first prototypes of the innovative tools that are going to be integrated in the final platform, among them the Model Authoring tool, for creating policy models in an easy and intuitive way, a technique for processing and annotation of arguments expressed in Social Web.

Who do you think the end users will be?

Two policy institutions and one NGO are already involved as end users in the pilot applications of NOMAD, i.e. the Greek Parliament, the Austrian Parliament and the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (EACCI). Apart from policy makers and policy advisors, which consist the core target group of NOMAD, a plenty of groups have been identified as potential users that can benefit from the usage of the NOMAD tools, such as journalists, researchers, business analysts, representatives of NGOs, federations and associations. However, NOMAD will be an easy to use system, available for every citizen who is interested in searching and analyzing the Social Web against a specific topic.

The link between new technologies and freedom of expression are important avenues for promoting democracy. Are there risks on the right to freely express one-self emanating from such a project?

NOMAD and other relevant projects, processing content expressed freely on Web do it in and aggregated way and preserve users’ anonymity, so that they comply on privacy specifications laid down by the competent authorities. As soon as the identity of sources of content is hidden, there is no risk on biasing freedom of expression.

Read the full NOMAD Newsletter here:
http://www.nomad-project.eu/Portals/0/NOMAD%20Newsletter%20November%202013.pdf