Prof. Elias N. Houstis

Dr. E. N. Houstis is Professor Emeritus of the University of Thessaly in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and Purdue University in the USA. Most of his academic career abroad is associated with Purdue University, and he served as a full professor, associate head, and director of the Computational Science and Technology program. In addition, he served as a professor at Aristotle University and the University of Patras, Greece. He contributed to establishing the Center of Research and Technology of Thessaly (CERETETH) that he managed for ten years.

His research extends to various Computational Science and Technology fields, especially to intelligent problem-solving environments based on statistical and AI technologies. He participated in more than 75 funded projects. He was responsible for two large-scale projects: "Regional Innovation Pole of Thessaly" (2006 - 2008) for CERETETH and "Intelligent Pole of Specialization and Development of Thessaly: Research, Innovation, Strategies (ESDP-TH)" (2012 – 2016). His research in the area of "Problem-Solving Environments" and "Environments based on large-scale data" have received special recognition. He has edited the books "Enabling Technologies for Computational Science: Frameworks, Middleware and Environments" (E.N. Houstis, J.R. Rice, E. Gallopoulos and R. Bramley editors), Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, March 2000, and "Computational Science, Mathematics, and Software": Proceedings of the International Symposium on Computational Science in Celebration of the 65th birthday of John R. Rice (Ronald F. Boisvert and E. N. Houstis editors), Purdue University Press, Sept. 2002. He has published more than 170 technical articles and participated in the organization of 10 international conferences. Furthermore, he has supervised 22 doctoral students in Greece and the USA. He has taught courses in data science, statistics, and mathematical robotics in the last ten years.

IME is a research effort of the University of Thessaly and Grant Thornton company that has its primary goal of linking research and innovation with entrepreneurship to enhance the competitiveness and sustainability of small businesses that can increase the domestic added value. IME can be viewed as a data-driven "small business Clinic."

Big data is big news today, and large companies in all sectors are making significant advances in customer relations, product selection and development, and consequent portability by using this valuable commodity. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have proved themselves to be slow adopters of the new big data analytics technology and are in danger of being left behind.

In Europe and Greece, SMEs are a vital part of the economy, and the challenges they encounter need to be addressed urgently. This talk describes the development of IME as an innovative hybrid advisory web service model based on big data analytics and its digital realization of the above model as web services on a well-established open-source software platform WSO2.

This talk focuses on a collection of "intelligent business analytics" services that IME provides as advisory support and their realization. IME promises to allow small businesses to take advantage of "data-driven decision-making" and significantly improve their productivity and profitability.