Athena Vakali

Athena Vakali is Professor at the Department of Informatics of Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece since 1997, where she’s leading the research group of Web data management . Her current research interests include Web usage mining, content delivery networks on the Web, Web and social Web data clustering and outsourcing, and Web operating system principles.

Studies

• PhD degree in Informatics entitled “Modern Magnetic Disks performance analysis” from the Department of Informatics, Aristotle University, 1997.
• MSc degree in Science from the Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, USA, 1988.
• BSc degree in Mathematics from the Department of Mathematics, Aristotle University, 1985.

Teaching

Undergraduate courses

• “Operating Systems”, at 5th semester of Informatics undergraduate course program, Dept. of Informatics, Aristotle University (since 1997).
• “Distributed Operating Systems”, at 6th semester of Informatics undergraduate course program, Dept. of Informatics, Aristotle University (since 1997).
• “Web Information Systems”, at 7th semester of Informatics undergraduate course program, Dept. of Informatics, Aristotle University (since 2003).
• “Internet Technologies, Services and Applications”, at 6th semester of Informatics undergraduate course program, Dept of Informatics, Aristotle University (1997-2002).
• Supervised more than 50 diploma theses at the Dept. of Informatics, Aristotle University (since 1997).

Graduate courses

• “Internet Information management”, at 2nd semester of Informatics MSc course program, Dept of Informatics, Aristotle University (since 2004).
• “Web Information frameworks”, at 1st semester of “Informatics and Management” MSc course program, Dept of Informatics, Aristotle University (since 2004).
• “Web Information Systems” at 1st semester of “Information and Communication Technology Systems” MSc course program, School of Science & Technology, International Hellenic University (since 2010).
• “Advances in Software Engineering”, at the 2nd year of Information Systems MSc course program, Hellenic Open University (since 2005).
• supervised more than 20 MSc level diploma thesis  (Aristotle University, Hellenic Open University)
• supervised 5 completed PhD dissertations with 2 of these former PhD students being already faculty members in domestic Universities and abroad (G. Pallis at University of Cyprus, L. Moussiades at Technological Institute of Kavala), and is currently supervising 4 PhD students and 4 MSc students theses.

Research

Prof Vakali has participated in more than 25 research and development projects from which she has scientifically leaded 17. In particular, she has leaded many research projects in the area of Web data management. Her most recent research activity involves relevant projects such as the on-going “Cloud4Trends: Leveraging the cloud infrastructure for localized real-time trend detection in social media” funded by the EU project Venus-C (2011-2012), the “Virtual Museum over a Sensor Web” funded by EOX Grants (2009-2011), the “Towards Archeological Heritage New Accessibility” EU funded Culture Project (2004-2007), the “XML Data Management on the Semantic Web” bilateral Research Project between Greece-Czech Republic, funded by the Greek Secretary of Research (2005 – 2008), the “Access Control Techniques on Distributed Environments and on the Web” bilateral Research Project between Greece-Italy, funded by Greek Secretary of Research (2005 – 2008), the “Hrakleitos: Methodologies and Techniques for Internet Objects Management” Research Project, funded by Greek Secretary of Research  (2003-2006), the “Internet Data Classification and Information Retrieval” bilateral research Project between Greece-China, funded by the Greek Secretary of Research  (2003-2005), the “Web Data Mining Algorithms” bilateral research project between Greece-Czech Republic, funded by the Greek Secretary of Research (2003 – 2008), and the “ERMIS: Development of an Advanced Collaborative e-business system for Retail Chain” Research Technological Development Framework, funded by the Information Society (2003-2005).

Publications

• co-edited 5 books (Springer, IGI), among which the most recent ones are from Springer namely the:
• Buyya, R., Pathan, Α., Vakali, A. (eds.): “Content Delivery Networks: Principles and Paradigms”, Springer Verlag, LNCS Vol.XVI, 2008.
• Vakali, A. and Lakhmi, J., (eds): “New Directions in Web Data Management”, Springer Verlag, Studies in Computational Intelligence, Volume 331, 2011.
• co-authored 15 book chapters in edited books from Springer and IGI
• 50 papers in refereed journals most of them at high quality journals, such as ACM Transactions on the Web, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Internet Computing, IEEE System Man &  Cybernetics, ACM Transactions on Modeling & Computer Simulation, World Wide Web Journal, etc
• 75 papers in international conferences with emphasis on Web technologies and data management topics such as the Web Information Systems Engineering (WISE), the ACM Hypertext Conference, the Social Networks and Social Media Mining on the Web in conjunction with DASFAA, the Conference for Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery (DaWaK), the ACM Conference on Recommender systems (RecSys), etc
• has received in total more than 750 citations and has an h-index of 15 (according to “Publish or Perish” tool).

Scientific

• PC member to many international conferences (she has been a PC member at 70 International Conferences and Workshops since 2005), and general chair and organizer of the EDBT’04 Workshop on “Clustering Information over the Web” (ClustWeb’04), the 2005 and 2006 ICDE-Workshop on “Challenges in Web Information Retrieval and Integration” (WIRI’05, ‘06) and the ESWC’08-Workshop on “Collective Semantics: Collective Intelligence and the Semantic Web” (CISWEB’08).
• organized and presented a tutorial about “Detecting, Understanding and Exploiting Web communities” at the 18th International World Wide Web Conference, Madrid April 2009, a tutorial about “Clustering on the Web: Theory and Practices” at the ADBIS Conference, Thessaloniki, September 2006, and a tutorial on “Learning from Evolving Data” at the ECML/PKDD 2010 Conference on Barcelona, September 2010.
• member of the editorial board of “Computers & Electrical Engineering” Journal (Elsevier) since 2007, the International Journal of Grid and High Performance Computing (IGI publishing) and the Web Intelligence  Journal (Inderscience), since 2009.
• has research collaboration with more than 15 Universities and Institutions (UPM-Spain, University of Trento-Italy, UNSW-Australia, University of Cyprus, Jao-Tong University-China, Boston University-USA, University of Claude Berbard-France, Sabanzi University-Turkey, Charles University-Czech Republic, and others).
• member of election boards and 3-tier advisory Committees for faculty positions at Computer Science and Engineering Departments at the Hellenic International University, the University of Athens, the University of Thessaly, the Harokopeion and the Agricultural University, Greece.