A visit to the Athena Research Centre was made by Takis Theodoriκakos, stressing that “the priority of the Ministry of Development is research and innovation directed to the applied economy and having tangible results for citizens, for our country”

The Minister of Development met with the research staff, young people, and young people working there. Significantly, five Greek researchers from “Athena” and the Polytechnic built a robotic platform for loading airline containers, in collaboration with Airbus, which showed great interest in automating the process.

“We must combine leadership in research and innovation with the ambition of young Greeks to create their families here, to realize their vision and ambitions for life in our country,” Theodorikakos said. He also stressed that “we can develop agricultural production with new technologies” and also pointed out that “Greece must become more productive, strengthen research and innovation that will make its businesses more competitive, with better products that can be exported. This is the only Greece that can be safe and remain standing. By strengthening our region and our borders, so that we can also stem the tide of flight to the basin.”

The Minister of Development also said that “over 370 million euros are going to upgrade the infrastructure of research centres. In the next two years the infrastructure picture will be completely different.” In conclusion, he said that “in the coming months, a comprehensive strategy for research and innovation will be presented, as a lot of money is being given and it has to pay off.”

Also presented during the visit were:

– A four-legged robot for use in precision agriculture, rescue and site surveillance

– A hybrid robot with a combination of wheels and legs for high-speed movement over challenging terrain

– An open-source large language model for Greek, which has been trained on Greek data and texts with about 45 billion words

– A robotic telesurgery prototype using haptic technology

– The Medical informatics platform: is about how to “run” an experiment on personal data that is normally inaccessible and combine data from many different hospitals, increasing the accuracy of the results

Finally, there were presentations of the active technoblasts of “Athena” (Symbiolabs, OPIX, Avisense, Kyklos) and the OpenAIRE organization, the Center of Excellence in Robotics called HERON, actions of the Archimedes Unit and a discussion on AI and AI Factories.