The University of Athens started operations on May 1837 on the north East Side of the Acropolis. It was the first University not only in the newly established Greek State but also in all the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean in general. The "Othonian University", as it was called before taking its present name, "National and Kapodistrian University of Athens", consisted of four Faculties, Theology, Law, Medicine and Arts (which included applied sciences and mathematics). A major change in the structure of the University came about in 1904, when the Faculty of Arts was split into two separate Faculties: Arts and Sciences, the latter consisting of the departments of Physics and Mathematics and the School of Pharmacy. Presently, the University has five Schools and a total of twenty-nine Departments located in four campuses near the center of Athens. Full-time undergraduate enrollment exceeds 35,000 students. The University's graduate programs enroll about 4,000 graduate students. Full-time faculty is 2282 and the total teaching, research and administrative staff is about 4,000 members.
The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (UoA) will participate in the project through a collaboration of the Pervasive Computing Research Group (http://p-comp.di.uoa.gr) in the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications and the Seismological Laboratory in the Department of Geophysics and Geothermics.
The Department of Informatics and Telecommunications was founded in 1989 and is part of the School of Applied Sciences. It consists of three divisions: Computer Science; Computer Systems and Applications; Telecommunications and Signal Processing. The Department has about 38 faculty members and over 200 M.Sc. and Ph.D. students. The M.Sc. programme offers four areas of specialization: High Performance Algorithms, Advanced Information Systems, Communication Systems and Networks, and, Signal Processing and Computer Systems.
The Pervasive Computing Research Group (http://p-comp.di.uoa.gr) is part of the Communication Networks Laboratory (CNL). CNL was founded in 1994 as a research unit in the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications. The CNL staff comprises a number of acknowledged researchers and engineers specialising in the fields of telecommunications, data networks, and multimedia applications. During the past years CNL has been actively involved in a number of international projects, funded mainly by the European Commission (e.g., ACTS, IST), as well as national projects, funded by Greek Ministries or other organisations in the area of Mobile/Wireless Communications and Specification/Testing of Telecommunication Protocols. The P-COMP research group of NKUA deals with various aspects of pervasive computing:
- WSN middleware. The group has developed the "Sensation" platform that promotes WSN application independence from the underlying hardware.
- Information management for WSN (data compression, transmission suppression, fusion, data discovery, scheduling, etc.)
- Middleware technologies for situation-, context- and location-aware services
- Management and processing of context information
- Context-sensitive user interfaces
- Modern knowledge-based technologies. Ontological engineering and Semantic Web technologies are adopted to support "smart" services (adaptation, inference of new knowledge, machine learning, re-configurability, etc.), particularly in embedded devices (Cognitive Services and Networks)
- Pervasive application engineering (e.g., pervasive telemedicine)
- Trust and security in autonomic and pervasive computing
- Machine-vision based sensors and sensor networks
P-COMP leads EU-funded projects related to environmental protection, IT support for crisis management and middleware for embedded devices in autonomic computing.