The GeoQA project will be carried out in close collaboration between the Artificial Intelligence team of the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and the Databases and Information Systems Group.
The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens was founded in 1837 and it is the oldest university in Greece. The Department of Informatics and Telecommunications has been active since 1986 and it is widely recognized as the top Computer Science department in Greece. It has been ranked consistently among top departments in Computer Science by the Academic Ranking of World Universities founded and compiled by the Shanghai Jiaotong University. The department currently has 37 active faculty members covering all areas of Informatics and Telecommunications. The department has a long standing tradition in research and teaching, and it is equipped with a number of contemporary research and teaching laboratories. It offers an excellent environment for undergraduate and postgraduate students (M.Sc. and Ph.D. levels). Many of the department faculty members are world leaders in their individual research areas, and have been awarded distinguished professional society fellowships (ACM, IEEE among them), prizes and awards. Four junior and one senior faculty members have recently been awarded prestigious grants (3 Starting Grants, 1 Consolidator Grant, 1 Advanced Grant and 1 Proof of Concept Grant) by the European Research Council. Many of the department’s alumni have gone on to distinguished careers in industry and academia, in Greece, Europe and elsewhere.
While the acceleration of hardware has been a landmark of progress in computing technology in the past few decades, the computing enhancements that it provides is dwarfed by the increase in speed, performance, and robustness resulting from new algorithms. As a point in case, the status of hardware and algorithms in 1970 allowed to compute an optimal tour of a traveling salesman (a classical optimization problem and accepted benchmark for computing power) through 120 cities. Increasing the number of cities from n to n+1 leads to a multiplicative increase of the number of possible tours by a factor of n. Thus, relying only on the increase of hardware speed, with today’s technology, and the algorithms of 1970 we could find optimal tours among only 135 cities. It is the progress in algorithms that, today, enables us to find optimal tours between many thousand of cities. Relying only on progress in hardware this performance would not be achievable in hundreds of years. The Max Planck Institute for Informatics is devoted to cutting-edge research in informatics with a focus on algorithms and their applications in a broad sense. Our research ranges from foundations (algorithms and complexity, programming logics) to a variety of application domains (computer graphics, geometric computation, constraint solving, program verification, databases and information systems, and computational biology/bioinformatics).