greece
Algorithms
Data Science
Artificial Intelligence
Title: The Imperative for Open Source Frontier AI - Oumi’s Platform & Strategy.
Speakers: Emmanouil Koukoumidis(CEO of Oumi PBC) and Oussama Elachqar(Member of Technical Staff at Oumi PBC)
Abstract: Open source is the best path to developing the most advanced, trusted, and versatile AI; the AI that would unlock industry applications and truly empower the sciences. Unfortunately though, frontier AI has become over the last 2+ years increasingly closed giving rise to significant concerns and risks. I will discuss the efforts that Oumi, alongside 20+ academics, recently started to put us on a better path by betting on and fostering open source frontier AI. Lastly, I will make a call to action. To succeed, broad collaboration is needed across academia, the industry, and across the world. Greece could be a key player and leader in this.
Emmanouil (Manos) Koukoumidis is the CEO of Oumi PBC focusing on democratizing foundation model research and development. He had previously led the science and engineering for Google Cloud’s Natural Language Services while also bootstrapping and leading the Google Cloud GenAI (PaLM/Gemini) efforts across a 300+ v-team covering model quality, Responsible AI, and all related infrastructure from inception all the way to General Availability. He has been working on GenAI systems since 2016 at Microsoft and then Meta. He holds a PhD from Princeton University where he set the early foundations for edge AI and a Diploma from the National Technical University of Athens. His research career includes positions at MIT, Microsoft Research, SMART (Singapore) and CERN. His research has been featured in top-tier conferences, journals and news articles receiving a Best Paper Award and other distinctions with over 4,000 citations.
Oussama Elachqar is a Member of Technical Staff at Oumi PBC, where he’s focusing on democratizing foundation model research and development. He holds an M.Sc. from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a Diplôme d'Ingénieur from INP-ENSEEIHT. Prior to Oumi, he led the vertical foundation model efforts for Healthcare at Apple, working all across the stack from pre-training, post-training, safety and performance optimizations. His expertise in generative AI systems spans nearly a decade, and his career includes leadership roles in Machine Learning at Microsoft, AI2 and Twitter, where he successfully delivered large-scale AI research projects to production. He specializes in scaling deep learning model training across HPC clusters and brings extensive experience in enterprise-scale AI deployment.
This talk will be held exclusively online through MS-TEAMS. More info below
To position Greece as a leading player in AI and Data Science
To build an AI Excellence Hub in Greece where the international research community can connect, groundbreaking ideas can thrive, and the next generation of scientists emerges, shaping a brighter future for Greece and the world
Welcome to ARCHIMEDES, a vibrant research hub connecting the global AI and Data Science research community fostering groundbreaking research in Greece and beyond. Its dedicated core team, comprising lead researchers, affiliated researchers, Post-Docs, PhDs and interns, is committed to advancing basic and applied research in Artificial Intelligence and its supporting disciplines, including Algorithms, Statistics, Learning Theory, and Game Theory organized around 8 core research areas. By collaborating with Greek and Foreign Universities and Research Institutes, ARCHIMEDES disseminates its research findings fostering knowledge exchange and providing enriching opportunities for students. Leveraging AI to address real-world challenges, ARCHIMEDES promotes innovation within the Greek ecosystem and extends its societal impact. Established in January 2022, as a research unit of the Athena Research Center with support from the Committee Greece 2021, ARCHIMEDES is funded for its first four years by the EU Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF).
Archimedes Research Unit of the Athena Research Center, Greece, is featured in a recent article in Dnews. This article is about an Archimedes flagship project in cardiology and AI that aims to use "two-dimensional echocardiographic data to develop deep learning tools and improve the treatment of heart problems."
Vasileios Moustakas, PhD student at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering - NTUA and Academic Fellow at Archimedes, Athena Research Center, Greece, Konstantinos Cheliotis and Anna Mylona, both MEng students at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering - NTUA and interns at Archimedes, Athena Research Center, Vassilis Alimisis, Postdoctoral Researcher at Archimedes, Athena Research Center, and Paul Sotiriadis, Lead Researcher at Archimedes, Athena Research Center, and a Professor at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering - NTUA, received the Best Paper Award (PhD Symposium) at the
Giorgos Papanastasiou, Lead Researcher at the Archimedes Research Unit of the Athena Research Center, Greece,and Faculty Research Fellow at Edinburgh Imaging, at the University of Edinburgh, the Queen’s Medical Research Institute, Edinburgh, UK, has co-published a Nature Communications paper on "Clinical implications of bone marrow adiposity identified by phenome-wide association and Mendelian randomization in the UK Biobank."Prof. Papanastasiou mentions that "this project is a strong testament to the power of augmenting biological research with advanced AI and data science methods."
The Archimedes Research Unit, part of the Athena Research Center, Greece, participated in this year's 89th Thessaloniki International Fair, which took place from September 6 to 14, 2025.
On Thursday, 11 September, 2025, from 11:00 am to 12:30 pm, at the Archimedes Amphitheatre (1 Artemidos Street, 15125, Marousi, Archimedes, Athena Research Center, Greece), Professor Elias Koutsoupias of the University of Oxford, UK, will deliver a talk on "The Communication Complexity of Combinatorial Auctions in Graphs."
The project “ARCHIMEDES Unit: Research in Artificial Intelligence, Data Science and Algorithms” with code OPS 5154714 is implemented by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan “Greece 2.0” and is funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU.
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