Data Science

ABOUT

The Data Science Group was established in 2019 and focuses on a) methodological research questions related to data science and algorithmic artificial intelligence, b) foundational questions regarding the best achievable performance limits in various tasks of data modeling, analysis and inference, and c) interdisciplinary research questions from a wide variety of research domains, including Social Sciences, Geo-Sciences, Bioinformatics and Biomedical Engineering, Environmental and Transportation Engineering, among others. Current activity areas include frequentist and Bayesian spatio-temporal modelling, the development of information-theoretic tools, high-dimensional and functional data analysis, time-series forecasting and online predictive and anomaly detection algorithms. Researchers from the Data Science Group participate in the Statistical Learning Lab, which fosters multidisciplinary collaborations, develops software products, research publications and patents and contributes to the education and training of students and young researchers.  

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITIES

  • Deep Learning and Generative AI

    Deep learning: Deep learning has recently been at the forefront of artificial intelligence (AI) research and has truly revolutionized several fields of AI. Data Science Group members are actively involved in developing methods that can help us both better understand the limitations of existing deep learning approaches and also improve various aspects of their performance. They have worked on a wide variety of topics from this area, exploring both fundamental questions and practical applications. This includes, to mention a few of these topics, exploring and proposing novel deep network architectures, developing new ways of effectively transferring knowledge between networks, revisiting weight parameterizations for deep networks in order to improve their generalization capabilities, proposing novel self-supervised and few-shot learning methods, devising and applying learning approaches that advance the state-of-the-art for fundamental problems from the areas of computer vision and image analysis, making use of attention in the context of knowledge distillation, proposing hybrid (scattering-based) convolutional network architectures that allow for better representation learning and more interpretable features, as well as properly adapting deep neural networks such that they can be applied to arbitrary graph-structured data directly and can also handle structured-prediction tasks.


    Neural-based Speech Synthesis - Deep Learning in Speech Processing: Deep Neural Networks have taken the engineering community by storm. Data-rich areas such as image processing and speech processing have been transformed during the last years. The Data Science Group combines its expertise on speech processing and applies deep learning techniques to applications such as voice conversion, speech synthesis and speech enhancement.


    Generative Adversarial Nets - Deep Generative Learning:  Generative models based on Deep Neural Nets have shown unprecedented capabilities in sampling data from complex but unknown distributions. Researchers in the Data Science Group develop novel algorithms for training generative models, focusing on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). GANs have been used in data augmentation schemes to generate synthetic data that follow the same distributional characteristics as the original dataset (which may contain sensitive information or limited number of cases). The proposed methodology has been applied to identify dyslexia in children, using measurements from specialized eye trackers.


  • Spatial, Temporal & Spatio-temporal Statistics
  • High-Dimensional and Sparse Statistics
  • Uncertainty Quantification
  • Additional Topics
  • Journal Club on AI
  • Education and Training

Data Science

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMS

A. ONGOING PROJECTS

  • Title: NEMO-Tools: Next-generation monitoring and mapping tools to assess marine ecosystems and biodiversity
    Funding Source: Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation
    Duration: 2024-2026
  • Title: smartHEALTH: European Digital Innovation Hub on Precision Medicine and Innovative E-health Services 
    Funding Source: EU
    Duration: 2024-2026
  • Title: “Causal discovery and inference for surrogate-assisted optimization”
    Funding Source and funding scheme: Research and Development Agreement among Huawei Technologies (Ireland) C.O and FORTH
    Duration: 10/12/2021-31/08/2025

B. COMPLETED PROJECTS

  • Title: Disentangled representation learning via Mutual Information optimization with applications in speech representation learning
    Funding Source: Private sector
    Duration: 2024
  • Title: STOMA: Towards real-time, enhanced text-to-speech synthesis on the device
    Funding Source: Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation
    Duration: 2022-2024
  • Title: FUSING: Biophysical tools FUSed via integrative computational approaches to decode protein foldING
    Funding Source: FORTH Synergy
    Duration: 2022-2024
  • Title: SCALINCS: Scaling stochastic dynamics: from microscopic interactions to macroscopic phenomena
    Funding Agency and funding scheme: Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I.) under the “First Call for H.F.R.I. Research Projects to support faculty members and researchers and the procurement of high-cost research equipment”
    Duration: 2020-2024
  • Title: Data Landscaping: Traffic and Mobility Data Sources of Official Statistics
    Funding Source: Eurostat
    Duration: 2022
  • Title: SOLAR-P: Evaluation of alternative solar panel technologies, computation of irradiance daily profiles
    Funding source: Saudi Aramco and KAUST
    Duration: 2021-2022
  • Title: Characterising population dynamics with applications in biological data
    Funding source: ESPA - Department of Development
    Duration: 2020-2021
  • Title: WNRG: Forecasting hourly wind-farm outputs based on wind-speed predictions from alternative providers
    Funding source: EREN-Hellas
    Duration: 2020
  • Title: ENRICH: Enriched communication across the lifespan
    Funding source: EU Horizon 2020, MSCA-ETN-2020
    Duration: 2017-2020

PUBLICATIONS

  • 2025

    • A Doxa, C Adam, N Nagkoulis, AD Mazaris, S Katsanevakis (2025) prior3D: An R package for three-dimensional conservation prioritization, Ecological Modelling 499, 110919.
    • K Ellrott, CK Wong, C Yau, MAA Castro, JA Lee, BJ Karlberg, JK Grewal, V Lagani, B Tercan, V Friedl, T Hinoue, V Uzunangelov, L Westlake, X Loinaz, I Felau, PI Wang, A Kemal, SJ Caesar-Johnson, I Shmulevich, AJ Lazar, I Tsamardinos,... (2025) Classification of non-TCGA cancer samples to TCGA molecular subtypes using compact feature sets, Cancer Cell (pdf file)
    • K Konsta, A Doxa, S Katsanevakis, AD Mazaris (2025) Projected marine heatwaves over the Mediterranean Sea and the network of marine protected areas: a three-dimensional assessment, Climatic Change 178 (2), 1-20.
    • FA Shah, VB Talisa, CCH Chang, S Triantafyllou, L Tang, FB Mayr, ... (2025) Heterogeneity in the effect of early goal-directed therapy for septic shock: A secondary analysis of two multicenter international trials, Critical Care Medicine 53 (1), e4-e14.

  • 2024
  • 2023
  • 2022
  • 2021
  • 2020
  • 2019

PEOPLE

RESEARCHERS
STUDENTS
  •       Biza Konstantina (PhD candidate)
  •       Georgoulis Elias (MSc candidate)
  •       Kofidis Andreas (MSc candidate)
  •       Litsas Anastasios (MSc candidate)
  •       Papadaki Maria-Eleni (MSc candidate)
  •       Raptakis Michail (PhD candidate)
ALUMNI

CONTACT US

For any information regarding the group please contact:

Data Science Group,
Institute of Applied and Computational Mathematics,
Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas
Nikolaou Plastira 100, Vassilika Vouton,
GR 700 13 Heraklion, Crete
GREECE

Tel: +30 2810 391800
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (Mrs. Maria Papadaki)

Tel.: +30 2810 391805
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (Mrs. Yiota Rigopoulou)