Georgios Meditskos

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki | AUTH · School of Informatics

Disfluency detection is a critical task in real-time dialogue systems. However, despite its importance, it remains a relatively unexplored field, mainly due to the lack of appropriate datasets. At the same time, existing datasets suffer from various issues, including class imbalance issues, which can significantly affect the performance of the mode...

The specification of deployment topologies for complex applications distributed across multiple heterogeneous infrastructures is a difficult process that encompasses multiple modeling tasks, engaging several actors, including application ops experts, resource experts on the specification of the target infrastructure resources, quality experts on th...

The details presented in this article revolve around a sophisticated monitoring framework equipped with knowledge representation and computer vision capabilities, that aims to provide innovative solutions and support services in the healthcare sector, with a focus on clinical and non-clinical rehabilitation and care environments for people with mob...

In this paper, we demonstrate the potential of a knowledge-driven framework to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of care through remote and intelligent assessment. More specifically, we present a rule-based approach to detect health related problems from wearable lifestyle sensor data that add clinical value to take informed decisions on fol...

This paper presents “DESMOS”, a novel ecosystem for the interconnection of smart infrastructures, mobile and wearable devices, and applications, to provide a secure environment for visitors and tourists. The presented solution brings together state-of-the-art IoT technologies, crowdsourcing, localization through BLE, and semantic reasoning, followi...

IoT-based applications need to be dynamically orchestrated on cloud-edge infrastructures for reasons such as performance, regulations, or cost. In this context, a crucial problem is facilitating the work of DevOps teams in deploying, monitoring, European Commission grant no. 825480 (H2020), SODALITE. and managing such applications by providing nece...

Fall events among older adults are a serious concern, having an impact on their health and well-being. The development of the Internet of Things (IoT) over the last years has led to the emergence of systems able to track abnormal body movements and falls, thus facilitating fall detection and in some cases prevention. Fusing information from multipl...

The continuing advancements in technology have resulted in an explosion in the use of interconnected devices and sensors. Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems are used to provide remote solutions in different domains, like healthcare and security. A common service offered by IoT systems is the estimation of a person’s position in indoor spaces, which i...

In what has arguably been one of the most troubling periods of recent medical history, with a global pandemic emphasising the importance of staying healthy, innovative tools that shelter patient well-being gain momentum. In that view, a framework is proposed that leverages multimodal data, namely inertial and depth sensor-originating data, can be i...

Creative industries play an important role in today's economy, being sources of growth that boost future development. Their products have a huge potential to be re-used and re-purposed, while at the same time they can enrich and improve the design process and create newly exploitable content. This short paper presents V4Link, a semantic annotation...

In human activity recognition studies it is important to identify an optimal set with the minimum number of features that will potentially improve the recognition rate. In the current paper we introduce a promising feature selection method that exploits the differences on the correlation structure of the features, between the different classes of t...

In this paper, we present a pipeline system that generates architectural landmark descriptions using textual, visual and structured data. The pipeline comprises five main components: (i) a textual analysis component, which extracts information from Wikipedia pages; (ii) a visual analysis component, which extracts information from copyright-free ima...

During the last decades, massive amounts of satellite images are becoming available that can be enriched with semantic annotations for the creation of value-added Earth Observation products. One challenge is to extract knowledge from the raw satellite data in an automated way and to effectively manage the extracted information in a semantic way, to...

In this chapter, we provide an overview of the current trends in using semantic technologies in the IoT domain, presenting practical applications and use cases in different domains, such as in the healthcare domain (home care and occupational health), disaster management, public events, precision agriculture, intelligent transportation, building an...

Although Augmented Reality (AR) technology has entered many market and knowledge domains such as games and leisure activities, it remains rather limited in digital heritage. After studying the potentiality of using modern AR elements in a museum context, this paper proposes the use of additional game and educational elements in the core AR applicat...

Developing and deploying applications across heterogeneous HPC and Cloud infrastructures is a challenging task that requires significant effort and expert knowledge to describe the specifics of the application deployment. Abstraction plays an important role in this domain, since it eliminates any unnecessary details, promotes reusability and intero...

This paper presents eHealth4MS, an assistive technology system based on wearable trackers to support the care of Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Initially, the system integrates a tracker and a smartphone to collect and unanimously store movement, sleep and heart rate (HR) data in an ontology-based knowledge base. Then, ontology patterns are used to provi...

Indoor localization techniques using Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) is attractive in the Internet of Things domain due to its simplicity and cost-effectiveness. However, there are many different approaches proposed in and there is not a common, widely acceptable solution in the research community. This is mainly due to the limited number...

Although many Ambient Intelligence frameworks either address heterogeneous ambient sensing or computer vision techniques, very limited work integrates both techniques in the scope of activity recognition in pervasive environments. This paper presents such a framework that integrates both a computer vision component and heterogeneous sensors with un...

Automated deployment and management of Cloud applications relies on descriptions of their deployment topologies, often referred to as Infrastructure Code. As the complexity of applications and their deployment models increases, developers inadvertently introduce software smells to such code specifications, for instance, violations of good coding pr...

There is great potential in interdisciplinary traveling platforms mingling knowledge about cultural heritage aspects, such as places with schedules providing visits or even containing augmented reality features also, along with environmental concerns to enhance personalized tourist experience and tripping avocation. For an ontological framework to...

Dialogue-based systems often consist of several components, such as communication analysis, dialogue management, domain reasoning, and language generation. In this paper, we present Converness, an ontology-driven, rule-based framework to facilitate domain reasoning for conversational awareness in multimodal dialogue-based agents. Converness uses We...

This paper introduces a virtual assistant framework that combines knowledge-based and statistical techniques to produce meaningful task-oriented conversations that are enhanced by "chatty" style dialogues in order to increase system's naturalness and user engagement. The paper describes how appropriate ontologies, semantic reasoning, dialogue manag...

In the recent years, the advancement of technology, the constantly aging population and the developments in medicine have resulted in the creation of numerous ambient assisted living systems. Most of these systems consist of a variety of sensors that provide information about the health condition of patients, their activities and also create alerts...

Recognition of daily actions is an essential part of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) applications and still not fully solved. In this work, we propose a novel framework for the recognition of actions of daily living from depth-videos. The framework is based on low-level human pose movement descriptors extracted from 3D joint trajectories as well as d...

Conversational agents are reshaping our communication environment and have the potential to inform and persuade in new and effective ways. In this paper, we present the underlying technologies and the theoretical background behind a health-care platform dedicated to supporting medical stuff and individuals with movement disabilities and to providin...

We present the technologies and the theoretical background of an intelligent interconnected infrastructure for public security and safety. The innovation of the framework lies in the intelligent combination of devices and human information towards human and situational awareness, so as to provide a protection and security environment for citizens....

This paper presents a system designed to utilize innovative spatial interconnection technologies for sites and events of environmental, cultural and tourist interests. The system will discover and consolidate semantic information from multiple sources, providing the end-user the ability to organize and implement integrated and enhanced tours. The s...

There is a great potential in creative industries, such as architecture and video game design, for re-using and re-purposing of digital content. Paintings, archival footage, documentaries, movies, reviews or catalogues, and various other forms of artwork can serve as sources of inspiration and design direction towards innovative designs and new con...

Background: Interactive smart home systems are particularly useful for people with cognitive impairment. Objective: To investigate the long-term effects of Assistive Technology (AT) combined with tailored non-pharmacological interventions for people with cognitive impairment. Methods: 18 participants (12 with mild cognitive impairment and 6 wi...

In this paper, we present work in progress on the development of a smart monitoring framework to support people with motor disabilities and their caregivers in clinical and non-clinical rehabilitation and care environments. The innovation of the platforms lies in the combination of smart monitoring solutions, such as activity recognition and lifest...

This paper presents the algorithms that CERTH-ITI team deployed to tackle flood detection and road passability from social media and satellite data. Computer vision and deep learning techniques are combined in order to analyze social media and satellite images, while word2vec is used to analyze textual data. Multimodal fusion is also deployed in CE...

are in great need of acquiring, re-using and re-purposing visual and textual data to recreate, renovate or produce a novel target space, building or element. This come in align with the abrupt increase, which is lately observed, in the use of immersive VR environments and the great technological advance that can be found in the acquisition and mani...

DemaWare is a Service-Oriented platform that aids in the timely assessment and monitoring of people with dementia in an Ambient Assisted Living context. This work presents in detail the underlying modules integrated in DemaWare, providing both software and hardware services. The system coordinates the retrieval of raw sensor data from a variety of...

Clinical assessment of behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD) in nursing homes is often based on staff member’s observations and the use of the Neuropsychiatric Inventory-Nursing Home version (NPI-NH) instrument. This requires continuous observation of the person with BPSD, and a lot of effort and manual input from the nursing hom...

The rise of the Semantic Web has provided cultural heritage researchers and practitioners with several tools for providing semantically rich representations and interoperability of cultural heritage collections. Although indeed offering a lot of advantages, these tools, which come mostly in the form of ontologies and related vocabularies, do not pr...

We describe a framework for lifelogging monitoring in the scope of dementia care, based on activity recognition from egocentric vision and semantic context-enrichment. As pure vision-based approaches appear to be already saturating in terms of recognition accuracy, we propose their enhancement with wearable bracelet accelerometer information. For t...

PaaS is a Cloud computing service that provides a computing platform to develop, run, and manage applications without the complexity of infrastructure maintenance. SMEs are reluctant to enter the growing PaaS market due to the possibility of being locked in to a certain platform, mostly provided by the market's giants. The PaaSport Marketplace aims...

We present iKnow, an ontology-driven framework for semantic situation understanding in pervasive multi-sensor environments for human activity recognition. iKnow capitalises on the use of OWL ontological knowledge to capture domain relationships between low-level observations and high-level activities, while context aggregation and activity interpre...

We present an intelligent embodied conversation agent with linguistic, social and emotional competence. Unlike the vast majority of the state-of-the-art conversation agents, the proposed agent is constructed around an ontology-based knowledge model that allows for flexible reasoning-driven dialogue planning, instead of using predefined dialogue scr...

Artificial Intelligence provides a rich set of methods and tools for implementing the Ambient Intelligence vision, i.e. to transform our environments into smart spaces assisting as with our everyday tasks in an intelligent, seamless and non-obtrusive way. Among them, Semantic Web technologies, such as RDF, ontology languages and others, can be used...

We present a framework for semantic situation understanding and interpretation of multimodal data using Description Logics (DL) and rules. More precisely, we use DL models to formally describe contextualised dependencies among verbal and non-verbal descriptors in multimodal natural language interfaces, while context aggregation, fusion and interpre...

We present work in progress on an intelligent embodied conversation agent that is supposed to act as a social companion with linguistic and emotional competence in the context of basic and health care. The core of the agent is an ontology-based knowledge model that supports flexible reasoning-driven conversation planning strategies. A dedicated sea...

A significant body of work on biomedical text mining is aimed at uncovering meaningful associations between biological entities, including genes. This has the potential to offer new insights for research, uncovering hidden links between genes involved in critical pathways and processes. Recently, high-throughput studies have started to unravel the...

In this paper we present a framework for conversational awareness and conflict resolution in spoken dialogue systems for home care assistance. Conversational awareness is supported through OWL ontologies for capturing conversational modalities, while interpretation and incremental context enrichment is facilitated through Description Logics reasoni...

A comprehensive multi-sensor monitoring and feedback system is presented, designed to support independent living for elderly people with dementia or other conditions and provide decision support for their formal and informal caregivers. This solution goes significantly beyond existing monitoring and assisted living approaches, which operate with a...

In order for ontology-based applications to be deployed in real-life scenarios, significant volumes of data are required to populate the underlying models. Populating ontologies manually is a time-consuming and error-prone task and, thus, research has shifted its attention to automatic ontology population methodologies. However, the majority of the...