Dr. Petros Daras is a Research Director (Grade A') of the Visual Computing Lab at the Information Technologies Institute. He received the Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering, the MSc degree in Medical Informatics and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering all from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece in 1999, 2002 and 2005, respectively.

His main research interests include 3D object recognition, indexing, classification and retrieval, real-time 3D reconstruction of dynamic scenes, compression and coding of 3D meshes, bioinformatics and medical image processing. His involvement with those research areas has led to the co-authoring of 70 papers in refereed journals (of which 33 in IEEE Journals), 194 in international conferences, 35 book chapters and 4 books. Dr. Daras has been involved in more than 59 projects, funded by the EC and the Greek Ministry of Research and Technology, having attracted as Researcher (July 2006 - May 2020): 21.487.553,18 EUR.

Among them, he is the Coordinator of the EU funded projects FASTER (H2020 - Running), PROTEIN (H2020 - running), HR-RECYCLER (H2020 - running) and Technical/Scientific Manager of: GRACE (H2020 - running), ALADDIN (H2020 - running), ASGARD (H2020 - running), ANITA (H2020 - running), EPIKOINONO (EDK/GGET- running), NADINE (H2020- running), ADVISE (FP7 - finished), I-SEARCH (FP7 - finished), VICTORY (FP6 - finished), LASIE (FP7 - finished), SURVANT (H2020 - finished), PATHWAY (H2020 - finished), DANTE (H2020 - finished), MATEISIS (H2020 - finished), FORENSOR (H2020 - finished).

Dr. Daras is a Senior Member of IEEE and member of the Technical Chamber of Greece. He served as chair of the IEEE Interest Group on Image, Video and Mesh Coding (2012-2014) and as a Key member of the IEEE Interest Group on 3D Rendering, Processing and Communications of IEEE Multimedia (2010-today). He regularly acts as a reviewer/evaluator for the European Commission; he served as coordinator of the Future Media and 3D Internet - Task Force, the "User Centric Media" cluster, and member of the "3D Media" cluster, the Future Internet Architectures (FIArch) group and the Future Internet Assembly of the Networked Media unit of the EC.

His involvement to the above-mentioned clusters and task forces has led to the co-authoring of numerous reports and white papers published by the EC. He is leading the Visual Computing Lab of ITI: vcl.iti.gr, which currently employs 74 people. He was the Chairman of the Insitute's scientific board (until Dec 2018).

Finally, he is co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of D-Cube, a spin-off company of CERTH/ITI (www.d-cube.eu). Download full CV.