FORTH - Foundation for Research and Technology

FORTH - Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas

The Institute of Computer Science (ICS) is one of the six institutes constituting the Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH), which is a non-profit organisation, monitored by the General Secretariat of Research and Technology. In its seventeen-year history, ICS-FORTH has established itself as a renown and highly competitive research institute in computer science and technology, with a broad range of RTD activities and an impressive record of participation in funded European and national projects. ICS has a full-time staff of 100 persons, about 15 visiting researchers and over than 120 graduate and undergraduate students. Over 3 MECU per year of ICS's funding, about 70% of the total costs, come from participation in European RTD programs; the other 30% of the costs come from the Ministry's budget.

ICS-FORTH is active in a number of areas including, but not limited to, telematics applications, distributed systems & resource allocation, user interfaces, integration of knowledge and databases, information systems, image processing & computer vision, robotics, machine learning, VLSI design, and decision support systems. It is actively promoting developed applications in industry and other organisations; in the past it has signed contracts with the Paul Getty Foundation, USA, and Daimler Benz, Germany. FORTH is a member of ERCIM and can use its partners to establish exploitation plans in countries where ERCIM is represented. Furthermore, ICS-FORTH has established FORTHNET S.A., which is historically the first and today the largest and most advanced internet enterprise in Greece, with a multiprotocol computer network that provides access to advanced services.

ICS-FORTH will participate in WEBFAIR with the Computer Vision and Robotics Laboratory (CVRL). The laboratory was established in 1985 and today employs approximately 25 highly skilled and experienced scientists, engineers and technicians. CVRL has a modern infrastructure (including robotic platforms, active vision systems, panoramic cameras, state of the art workstations, etc.), that facilitates experimentation with the developed methods and demonstration of research results. CVRL's activities emphasise research and development in the areas of image processing and analysis, computer vision and autonomous robots:

Image processing and analysis: Feature extraction, image and video segmentation, colour and texture analysis, image and video retrieval by content.
Computer vision: Visual perception of static and dynamic characteristics of 3D world (motion, depth, shape, colour, and texture).
Autonomous mobile robots: Robot navigation, obstacle detection and avoidance, path planning, landmark-based localisation, visual serving.

In pursuing the above tasks, the group's efforts are oriented towards the development of robust solutions as well as their efficient implementation in specific application domains. CVRL participates in various national and European funded projects that are closely related to the above tasks. Currently, it is the co-ordinator of the VIRGO TMR Network aiming at the study and development of techniques for vision-based robot navigation and the national DRIVER project that addresses the development of an autonomous robotic wheelchair. CVRL also co-ordinates the IST TOURBOT project, that provides background technology for the WEBFAIR project.

Back