Babak Akhgar is Professor of Informatics, co-founder and Director of CENTRIC (Centre of excellence in terrorism, resilience, intelligence and organized crime research) at Sheffield Hallam University and Fellow of the British Computer Society. Prof Akhgar graduated from Sheffield Hallam University in Software Engineering. Afterwards he gained considerable commercial experience as a Strategy Analyst and Methodology Director for several companies. He consolidated this experience by obtaining a Masters degree (with distinction) in Information Systems in Management and a PhD in Strategic Information Systems from Sheffield Hallam University. He has more than 140 publications in international journals and conferences on SIS with specific focus on knowledge management (KM) within security domain. He has successfully supervised 12 PhD students. He is member of editorial boards of a number of international Journals, Chair and programme committee member of several international conferences. He has extensive and hands on experience in development, management and execution of Intelligence Management projects in large international security initiatives (e.g. Application of social media in crisis management, intelligence based combating of terrorism and organised crime, Gun crime, cyber security, Big Data and cross cultural ideology polarisation) with multi-million Euros budgets. In addition to this he is currently the technical lead of 3 EU Security projects; "Courage" on Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism and "Athena project" on Application of social media and mobile devices in crisis management and "Tensor" on identification of terrorist generated content. Prof Akhgar is founder of CENTRIC OSINT Hub, which provides law enforcement agencies with state of art capabilities to conduct wide range of open source based investigation from Organised Crime network to Counter Terrorism. CENTRIC OSINT HUB is used by wide range of LEAs in UK. He has co-edited a book on Intelligence management (Knowledge Driven frameworks for combating Terrorism and Organised crime). His recent books are titled Strategic Intelligence Management (National Security Imperatives and Information and Communications Technologies) Emerging Trends in ICT Security, Application of Big Data for National Security and Application of OSINT for investigation. Prof Akhgar was Trustee of Police National Legal Database (PNLD) for 2 years. In 2016 Prof Akhgar was chairman of Police Strategy forum. Prof Akhgar is member of academic advisory board of SAS UK, member of UN Safer cities technology task force, Board member of European Organisation for Security (EOS) and member of Europol external advisory board on data protection.
Dimitrios Kavallieros is a senior research associate and project manager at MultiMoDal Data Fusion and Analytics Group (M4D) of the Multimedia Knowledge and Social Media Analytics Laboratory (MKLab) which is part of the Informatics and Telematics Institute (ITI) of the Center of Research and Technology, Hellas (CERTH, Greece) focusing on cybersecurity research and innovation technologies. He holds an MSc in Ethical Hacking and Computer Security from the University of Abertay. He is currently PhD candidate at University of Peloponnese. He has edited 2 books and more than 30 articles in conference proceedings, journals and book chapters with specific focus in cybersecurity, cyberterrorism and digital forensics. He has participated in several European funded research projects assuming different roles such as coordinator, project manager, technical manager, scientific leader mainly focused on Cybersecurity, Cybercrime and Cyberterrorism, IoT & Cloud Security/Forensics, Digital Forensics and Blockchain technology topics.
Stefanos Vrochidis received the Diploma degree in Electrical Engineering from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, the MSc degree in Radio Frequency Communication Systems from University of Southampton and the PhD degree in Electronic Engineering from Queen Mary University of London. Currently, he is a Senior Researcher (Grade C) with the Information Technologies Institute of the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (ITI-CERTH) and the Head of the Multimodal Data Fusion and Analytics (M4D) Group. His research interests include multimedia understanding and retrieval, multimodal fusion, computer vision, multimodal analytics, artificial intelligence, as well as industrial, media & arts, environmental and security applications. Dr. Vrochidis has participated in more than 80 European and National projects and has been member of the organization team of several conferences and workshops. He has edited 3 books and authored more than 300 related scientific journal, conference and book chapter publications. He has served as a reviewer in several international Journals and as Technical program committee in well reputed conferences and workshops.
Ilias Gkotsis, Senior Project Manager, holds a Dipl.-Ing. in Mechanical and Aeronautics Engineering from University of Patras and an MSc in Energy Production and Management from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece. He has over 10 years of experience in the energy, transportation, and security sector, through the implementation of R&D projects, technical studies, and educational courses. His R&D topics of interest include critical infrastructure protection and resilience, protection of public spaces, civil protection, crisis management, UAS (being also a certified pilot by HCAA/EASA) and counter-UAS solutions, traffic modelling and transport network management, energy, and environmental impacts. Over the last years, he is heavily involved (Coordinator, WP/Task leader, Dissemination leader, Security Advisory Board, Use case manager, etc.) in EU and Nationally Funded R&D projects (HEU, H2020, FP7, DG ECHO, CIPS, ISF, NSRF, etc.), in various activities such as project management, analysis of end user requirements, technical specifications definition, identification of KPIs, stakeholder engagement, system evaluation and demonstration, exercises organization and implementation, lessons learned and best practices definition and capitalization. Currently he is a project manager in SATWAYS Ltd (company developing Security and Public Safety solutions).
Nikolai Stoianov, assoc. prof. (male), Deputy Director of Bulgarian Defence Institute. He is well experienced in development of information systems with different designation, many of which are already brought into use in the Bulgarian Army. He is specialized in the field of Information Security and as such is involved in the European Projects on the FP7 INDECT, "HOMER". H2020 projects GaP, ROBORDER, CAMELOT, FOLDOUT, MEDEA, EDA projects SPIDER, PYTHIA, and NATO SPS project CyRADARS. He is member of external advisory group of FP7 project "PANOPTESEC". Dr. Nikolai Stoianov is a NATO STO Board member, Bulgarian national representative in NATO STO IST Panel, National EDA S&T Director, and he is member of Future concepts and tools for Cyber Defence", "Cyber Defence Situational Awareness", Defence Implications of Cloud Computing at Tactical Edge, Cyber Attack Detection, Forensics and Attribution for Assessment of Mission Impact, Visual Analytics (Cyber Security), Intelligent Autonomous Agents for Cyber Defence and Resilience, and Research Lecture Series Director on "Cyber Security Science and Engineering", EDA AHWR Cyber security. Dr.Stoianov has more than 80 published paper in national and international scientific conferences and journal, he is author and co-author of four books in field of information security. The project experience of Dr.Stoianov consists of: Project coordinator of NATO SPS project CyRADARS (2017-2020). WP leader of FP7 HOMER project (2013-2016); WP leader of EDA projects SPIDER (2016-2018), PYTHIA (2018-2020), Task leader in H2020 project ROBORDER (2017-2020),External Advisory Board member of FP7 Project PANOPTESEC (2013-2016); Lecture series director for NATO STO research lecture series on Cyber Security Science and Engineering (2016-2019).
Dimitris Diagourtas has 30 years working experience in private, academic and public sectors. He received in 1991 his B.Sc. in Physics from National & Kapodistrian University of Athens and since 1992 he was working as a researcher in the Seismological Laboratory of University of Athens for 14 years involved in research activities related mainly to engineering seismology, design and development of real time acquisition systems, earthquake early warning, earthquake risk assessment. He participated in numerous EU funded research projects in the frame of (EVG1, ENV4, EV5V, EV4C, EPOCH, JOUG, IST, MAST III, Growth, Craft, EESD, FP6 and FP7) and he is co-author of more than 45 papers in International Journals and Conferences. He worked for 2 years (2002-2004) in the General Secretariat for Research & Technology of the Ministry of Development as Special Consultant for European Space Agency (ESA) bilateral relationship, member of the team that designed the accession of Greece to ESA Convention, member of the High level Committee for the definition of Hellenic National Space Policy, National representation at ESA PBEO and JCB bodies. In 2006 he co-founded Satways Ltd. and since then he is acting as Managing Director, with involvement in both commercial projects delivery as well as EU (FP7, H2020, HEU) and National (GSRT) funded research activities focused in the domains of Critical Infrastructure Resilience, First Responders Collaborative response, Natural Hazards early warning and crisis management and real time sensors systems development in seismoacoustics. In 2021 he co-founded Astrial GmbH with offices in Adlershof Berlin in Germany and he is acting as Chief Business Development.
