The Information Technologies Institute (ITI),( http://www.iti.gr) – formerly known as Informatics and Telematics Institute – is a research Institute founded in 1998 as a non-profit organisation under the auspices of the General Secretariat for Research and Technology (GSRT) of Greece. Since 10.3.2000, ITI has been a founding member of the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH, http://www.certh.gr). CERTH-ITI has a staff of 7 researchers, and more than 250 research fellows and assistants, as well as administration and technical staff. CERTH-ITI has participated in more than 80 EC ICT projects – having coordinated at least 20 of them—and more than 100 National research projects or private sector Consulting Subcontracts. Over the last ten years, the CERTH-ITI team has authored over 200 publications in scientific journals, 65 books & book chapters, and over 300 papers in international conferences. Its involvement with FP7 projects highly relevant to ECOPOTENTIAL includes the active participation in BIO_SOS (FP7-SPA.2010), FIRESENSE (FP7-ENV.2009), and PESCADO (FP7-ICT.2010).
In 2005, CERTH was awarded the “European Group Technical Achievement Award” by the European Association for Signal, Speech and Image Processing (EURASIP) for significant contributions to the theory and application of digital filtering and image processing and coding. In 2008, CERTH was among the first Greek research organisations to undersign and accept the principles of the Charter and Code for researchers while at the same time CERTH representatives were members of the Greek delegation at the Steering Group for Human Resources and Mobility (SG HRM). Its latest achievement in the field of human resources is the “HR EXCELLENCE IN RESEARCH” logo awarded by the EC in April 2012 as a proof that CERTH is committed to offer the best possible working conditions, regardless the socioeconomic environment; towards the realization of the European Research Area (Innovation Union, Commitment #4).
The team participating in ECOPOTENTIAL is part of the CERTH-ITI Visual Analytics, Virtual and Augmented Reality Laboratory (VARLab, http://varlab.iti.gr). For more information on CERTH-ITI remote sensing related activities the interested reader may visit http://www.iti.gr/iti/people/Ioannis_Manakos.html or directly contact its scientific responsible in ECOPOTENTIAL, Dr. Ioannis Manakos (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.).
Principal investigator:
Ioannis Manakos received his Ph.D. in Forestry by the Centre of Life and Food Sciences Weihenstephan at the Technical University of Munich (2003). He specialized in spectroradiometric measurements, reflectance modelling, satellite image and geospatial data analysis for applications related with agriculture, environment, and physical geography. He is a Researcher in ‘Remote Sensing’ at CERTH/ITI and Adjunct Professor at the International Centre for Advanced Mediterranean Agronomic Studies (CIHEAM). He cooperates with the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), with the Land Cover and Land Use Change program of NASA, and is currently serving as the Chairman of the European Association of Remote Sensing Laboratories (EARSeL) Special Interest Group in Land Use and Land Cover. He is involved in numerous research and development projects the last 15 years in various funding frameworks (incl. H2020 & FP7 ones). His publication record comprises of numerous articles in renowned scientific journals, conferences, and books.
His role in Ecopotential is to support activities in WP4 and specifically land cover/use, ecosystem and habitats classifications, knowledge- and data-driven classification techniques for multi-scale land cover/use maps and their conversion to habitat maps; WP6 for EO-based ecosystem modelling and development of ecosystem monitoring data services; WP9 for EO-based intercomparison of the Essential Ecological and Environmental Protection Descriptors.