News

Dr. Dimitrios Zarpalas and Dr. Anastasios Dimou Have Joined the Editorial Board of MDPI Drones   Drones is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal. The journal focuses on design and applications of drones, including unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) and Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS). Drones is the only international open-access journal about the science, policy and technology of drones and its applications. Nowadays, the proliferation of drones is a reality for local policy makers, regulatory bodies,…

VCL Stands Out in the ICMCIS 2021 Drone Detection Challenge   The International Conference on Military Communication and Information Systems (ICMCIS) organized by NATO Communications and Information Agency announced a data challenge asking participants to track, classify and identify Class I UAS as they fly within a defined area, from data provided by the available sensors. The drones had to be tracked, to show their location and velocity, classified to indicate their object type (e.g. drone, bird) and identified to…

The H2020 project RESCUER is planned to Kick-Off on July 2021. RESCUER “first RESponder-Centered support toolkit for operating in adverse and infrastrUcture-less EnviRonments” is addressing the call “DRS-02-2020-OPEN: Technologies for first responders”. RESCUER aims to design and develop a First-Responder-centered technology toolkit that will empower the next-generation of First Responders (FR) by enhancing their operational capacity and safety, specifically in adverse conditions, both environmental and infrastructure-wise. Dr. Dimitris Zarpalas will be acting as the Technical Manager of the project.

VCL has Received the Second Prize in the Open Optimization Competition 2020, Held in GECCO 2021   The Open Optimization Competition 2020 concerns code contributions made to the Nevergrad and IOHprofiler open source tools. Nevergrad is an open source platform for derivative-free optimization, while IOHprofiler is a tool for benchmarking iterative optimization heuristics such as local search variants, evolutionary algorithms, model-based algorithms, and other sequential optimization techniques. VCL’s contribution to the Nevergrad platform was the introduction of a benchmark for…

Dr. Dimitrios Zarpalas and Dr. Anastasios Dimou are guest editors of the upcoming Sensors special issue titled “Deep Learning Based UAV Detection, Classification, and Tracking”   UAVs (a.k.a. drones) are available in a wide range of sizes and capabilities, introducing unprecedented opportunities but also threats in terms of safety, privacy, and security. While the introduction of artificial intelligence and deep learning in conjunction with hardware innovations have significantly improved the capabilities to detect and classify drones, counter-UAV systems are facing…

Dr. Theodoros Semertzidis discusses challenges in critical infrastructure protection and CERTH’s contribution in InfraStress   In an online interview with the dissemination manager of InfraStress, Dr. Theodoros Semertzidis discusses some of the challenges associated with protecting critical infrastructure as well as various technologies developed by CERTH towards this goal. More specifically, the Visual Computing Lab of CERTH is expected to deploy computer vision and machine learning solutions in order to provide automated anomaly detection and human action recognition capabilities to…