Organizers
Sergios-Anestis Kefalidis
Sergios-Anestis Kefalidis is a Ph.D. student and Research Assistant in the AI Team of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He holds a B.Sc. and a MSc. in Computer Science from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He has actively participated in multiple European research projects (DA4DTE, GeoQA, STELAR). His research focuses on universal question-answering over knowledge graphs and applications for geospatial question-answering systems. His Ph.D. research is supported by the “NIK. D. XRYSOVERGI” scholarship of the Greek State Scholarship Foundation. Before his involvement with the AI Team, during his undergraduate studies, he participated in Google Summer of Code 2020, 2021 and 2022. During this time he was an active contributor of open-source software and has even served as a core developer and maintainer for the widely used Xfce desktop-environment for UNIX-like systems.
Kostas Plas
Kostas Plas is a Ph.D. student and Research Assistant in the AI Team of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He holds a BSc. and a MSc. in Computer Science from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. His research focuses on optimizing graph databases and geospatial triple stores as well as spatial reasoning in LLMs. His Ph.D. is supported by the scholarship with code “GD.402. ARCHI-YPPhD-0824” from the Archimedes Research Unit. He has gathered experience in geospatial knowledge graph and knowledge graph augmentation and manipulation through the usage of LLMs in his participation on the European projects DA4DTE and STELAR.
Manolis Koubarakis
Manolis Koubarakis is a Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Dept. of Informatics and Telecommunications of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, where he directs the AI Team. He is also an affiliated researcher of the Archimedes Unit, a Fellow of EurAI since 2015 and Member of the EurAI Board since 2022. He has published more than 250 papers that have been widely cited (8973 citations and h-index 52 in Google Scholar) in the areas of Artificial Intelligence (especially Knowledge Representation and Constraint Programming), Databases (especially temporal and spatial databases), Semantic Web, Knowledge Graphs and Linked Data (especially geospatial and Earth observation data), and Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing. Manolis has taught at university level since 1995 and is a recognized AI researcher in spatial reasoning, geospatial databases, and knowledge graphs. He has given many tutorials and has led many laboratories for undegraduate and graduate courses.
Cogan Shimizu
Cogan Shimizu is an Assistant Professor at Wright State University, USA, in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, where he directs the Knowledge and Semantic Technologies (KASTLE) Lab. His work broadly spans the field of knowledge engineering, but it is rooted in pattern-based design and implementation of modular ontology. These techniques have been applied across many domains, including digital history, geospatial knowledge graphs, logistics, and education. By now, he has also pivoted into foundational research for neurosymbolic artificial intelligence across these domains. Cogan has authored over 100 peer reviewed articles in highly regarded venues. Cogan has been teaching undergraduate and graduate courses since 2015, and has helped deliver many tutorials at ISWC, ESWC, and WWW.
