Thursday, November 17, 2011

AEGEAN Startups - A Greek startups competition

The final phase of the first National eBusiness Entrepreneurship Competition - AEGEAN Startups - was held in Karlovasi, Samos, on 5th and 6th November 2011. The final phase involved the presentation of 9 proposals that were selected from a total of 35 originally submitted. The presentation of proposals and the final selection and award of the teams were held at the Ceremonial Hall of the Municipality of Samos, in Karlovassi.

The three proposals that were selected at the final stage and will be awarded with 15,000 euros each, are:

Empires At War 1805
An original, international online strategy game

Parking Defenders
Application for sharing public parking space via mobile devices

Personalization-as-a-service, Infolytics
Consumer Behaviour analysis and recommendation system  

The Agean Startups Finalists in Karlovassi, Samos

The Aegean Startups competition is co-organised by the University of Aegean, the Athens University of Economics and Business and the National Technical University of Athens, under the exclusive sponsorship of TANEO fund.

The PADGETS project: Google engagement in Social Media based policy campaigns

It was a great pleasure to have a plenary meeting of the PADGETS research project at Google premises in Zurich, Switzerland. The PADGETS project develops a revolutionary platform for politicians and policy makers, allowing them to publish information, interact with citizens, monitor and analyse citizen opinion.

The padgets project is being implemented by a consortium of leading research centres (University of the Aegean, National Technical University of Athens, Fraunhofer FOKUS, ISMB, University Regensburg)  enterprises (Google, Whitehall Srl, ATC SA, Tech4i2) and administrations from Greece, Italy and Slovenia.



The PADGETS team at Google Zurich

Within the project, several new technologies are for the first time combined, tested and optimised in the electronic governace context, incuding:

  • Web and Mobile Dashboards for implementing policy campaigns on-line, allowing for automatic communication with multiple Social Media platforms
  • Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis of citizen interactions in blogs and social media, such as facebook, twitter, youtube. 
  • Modelling and Simulation of citizen awareness, interest or involvement in public policy
  • Visualisation of policy discussions, citizen interaction and trending.
PADGETS project includes one of the first applications of Google Chart Tools in policy visualisation.





Left: visualising tweets concernign a specific policy campaign using Google Map gadget.








Right: visualising different group interactions in Facebook, on a specific subject






A new book from IGI Global on social and semantic web. The PADGETS project presented


A new book has recently been published by IGI Global, in the area of customer relationship managent (CRM).  Titled "Customer Relationship Management and the Social and Semantic Web: Enabling Cliens Conexus" the book provides an overview of the field of the Semantic Web, the social Web, and CRM through a careful collection of various research studies from different subfields.

Edited by Ricardo Colomo-Palacios (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain), João Varajão (University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Portugal) and Pedro Soto-Acosta (University of Murcia, Spain), the book provides a forum for the exchange of research ideas and practices, while being a reference point for professionals, managers, and researchers in the CRM, ICT and management fields.  The book also aims to explore the opportunities and challenges for organizations in the light of citizens having augmented presence in Web 2.0, by utilising new technologies, including those of the semantic web. 

Within this framework, together with colleagues from University of Aegean and Fraunhofer FOKUS, we present the recent developments and propositions for utilisation of Social Media within the governance context.  Our chapter "Systematically Exploiting Web 2.0 Social Media in Government for Extending Communication with Citizens" presents the perspective and offerings of the PADGETS project - an innovative attempt to combine Social Media, Text Analytics and Simulation in collaborative public policy making.  

Friday, November 4, 2011

An Interview on Interoperability Standards and Digital Agenda 2020

It was a great pleasure to have a film-making team from the oncoming Danish EU presidency, in the Greek Interoperability Centre premises at NTUA, to record a small interview on interoperability and standardisation issues of the EU Digital Agenda.

The interview revolved around ICT standardisation in the Public Sector and respectice challenges for the ICT industry, especially SME's, touching upon:

- The need for timely evolution and adoption of ICT standards by the public sector
- The innovative nature of ICT SME's and how they can be of use to a legacy-based public sector
- The evolving standardisation at EU and National levels.

The final edited video clip will be available in a couple of months.


With Rasmus (director) and Ralf (cameraman) at the GIC premises