South-East European Research Centre

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    Greece and EU structural funds: what do the choices made by Greece regarding the allocation of structural funds over the past three decades imply for the developmental model of the country?
    (Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung e.V., Sankt Augustin/Berlin, 2015) Karvounis, Alexandros ; Zaharis, Nikos
    Greece has been a net recipient of EU structural funds for the past 28 years, starting with the Integrated Mediterranean Programmes (1986–1989) and progressing through four programming periods (1st Community Support Framework – CSF 1989–1993, 2nd CSF 1994–1999, 3rd CSF 2000–2006, 1st National Strategic Reference Framework –NSRF 2007–2013). The country is now engaged in intensive preparations for the design and implementation of its strategy for the 6th consecutive programme: the 2nd NSRF 2014–2020. This paper examines the macro-level choices made by consecutive Greek governments throughout this period, focusing on investment in three major areas: public infrastructure (with special reference to transportation infrastructure); education and human resources; research and innovation and support for private investment in the secondary and tertiary sectors. It attempts to map the investment priorities in these three areas, analysing their implications for the country’s development pattern and providing insights and explanations for the choices made (or the design rationale). Finally, the paper attempts to offer an initial opinion on planning for the new programming period (2014-2020) and the potential contribution towards Greece’s attainment of the EUROPE 2020 goals.
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    Implementing circular economy in a regional context: A systematic literature review and a research agenda
    (Journal of Cleaner Production, 2022-07-11) Arsova Sanja ; Genovese Andrea ; Panagiotis H. Ketikidis
    Regions are the most important administrative units of the EU’s development policies and so far, have been extensively used for framing and implementing strategic priorities. However, when it comes to regional implementation of the circular economy (CE), there is lack of systematicity both in academic literature and policy documents. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to improve the understanding of the regional adoption of CE, by systematically reviewing and synthesises the current academic literature in this emerging field, unveiling research gaps and discussing a future research agenda. The review was conducted by identifying relevant academic papers from leading journals using the Scopus and Web of Science databases. Overall, 82 relevant papers were identified through the review, which proceeded to descriptive, bibliometric and content analysis. This study has found that generally, the adoption of the circular economy on the regional level is underexplored, which was supported by the dearth of relevant academic contributions detected at the beginning of the process. To the best of the researchers’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to provide a holistic systematic literature review in the regional circular economy domain. Hence, the present study is considered as a crucial initial contribution in the direction of establishing robust conceptual frameworks which involve the constructs of regional circular economy and laying the groundwork for future studies in this field.
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    Implementing Regional Circular Economy Policies: A Proposed Living Constellation of Stakeholders
    (Sustainablity MDPI, 2021-04-27) Arsova Sanja ; Genovese Andrea ; Panagiotis H. Ketikidis ; Adrian Solomon ; Alberich Pinyol Josep
    The transition towards the circular economy (CE) entails transformative and system‐wide changes, implying involvement, alignment, and cooperation between all stakeholders at all levels. However, debate continues around how best to achieve this. Additionally, little attention has been paid to developing models for identifying and mobilising all relevant stakeholders to implement CE policies at the regional level. This study sought to remedy these issues by analysing the relevant academic literature and policy documents and making the first attempt to adjust existing models— not only for the purpose of stakeholder mapping, but also for the proposition of a living constella‐ tion of stakeholders who should be considered when designing the transition towards a CE in a regional scenario. The CE‐centric quintuple‐helix model developed and proposed here promotes the emergence and deployment of trilateral networks, hybrid organisations, and development/co‐ operation platforms. This model adopts a balanced, participatory approach that requires a new con‐ stellation of stakeholders. Its foundations are built on the traditional industry–government–aca‐ demia nexus and enlarged by the inclusion of the civil society sphere and the environmental sub‐ system. The environment is represented as the nucleus of the model, inspiring and triggering ac‐ tions by the remaining four subsystems. The model is then implemented into two European regions with CE initiatives (Spain and Greece) to demonstrate its practical application.
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    Modelling and simulation of a new cooperative algorithm for UAV swarm coordination in mobile RF target tracking
    (Elsevier, 2021-02-01) Spyridis, Yannis ; Lagkas, Thomas ; Sarigiannidis, Panagiotis ; Zhang, Jie
    Recent advancements in sensor technology have allowed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to function as sensing devices in cooperative aerial communication networks, offering novel solutions in applications of environment inspection, disaster detection and search and rescue operations. Towards this trend, the efficient deployment and coordination of UAV networks is of vital importance. Generating controlled experimental conditions to implement and evaluate different approaches in this context can be impractical and costly and thus the solution of modelling is often preferred. This paper introduces a tracking model in which multirotor UAVs, equipped with received signal strength indicator (RSSI) sensors, are organized in a swarm and cooperate to approximate and trail a moving target. The proposed algorithm is able to offer autonomous tracking in large scale environments, by utilising just the strength of the communication signal emitted by a radio frequency transmitter carried by the target. A model of the proposed algorithm is created, and its performance is thoroughly evaluated in a specialized simulator developed in the Processing IDE. Results demonstrate the increased tracking efficiency of the proposed solution compared to a trilateration method.
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    Pan-European Entrepreneurial Summer Academies with Impact: The Case of STARTIFY7
    ( 2017) Bibikas, D. ; Vorley, T. ; Wapshott, R.
    Entrepreneurship is viewed as essential to the future prosperity of Europe and creating societies that are socially and economically inclusive. The information communication technology (ICT) sector has been identified as an area of great entrepreneurial potential for Europe and yet the continent struggles to create global leaders in the digital startup space. In response to this challenge, the European Commission launched its Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan to stimulate and support young people to become entrepreneurs and exploit the potential of ICT, in terms developing new digital products and services. This chapter reports on a project to develop and deliver a series of pan-European summer academies for entrepreneurship training funded by Horizon 2020. The chapter details the process of developing the academies and offer reflections on the impacts of the project.
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    Reflections on a study visit to Silicon Valley: What lessons can a South East European Region learn from the San Francisco Bay Area Innovation System?
    (International Conference for Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Regional Development, 2013) Zaharis, Nikos
    Based on a study tour to San Francisco organized by the INNOPOLIS, INTERREG IVC project, an attempt is made to identify the main elements of the Bay Area’s innovation system and draw up lessons for regions in the EU and especially the South-Eastern part of the EU. The paper examines the role of the higher education system, the role of culture and the role of the public sector in relation to creation and promotion of innovative entrepreneurship in the area and proceeds to compare them to the region of Central Macedonia in Greece. An attempt is also made to define the main characteristics that make the “Silicon Valley ecosystem” unique and provide useful insights for stakeholders and policy makers in regions with less well developed innovation ecosystems. The question whether the Silicon Valley ecosystem can be duplicated is answered in a negative way, but it is argued that nevertheless valuable conclusions and recommendations valid to any innovation ecosystem may be drawn.
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    Software co-development in the era of cloud application platforms and ecosystems: the case of CAST.
    (Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg., 2012) Kourtesis, D. ; Bratanis, K. ; Bibikas, D. ; Paraskakis, I.
    Interest around cloud computing has been growing quite rapidly during the past few years, and the model of cloud computing is evolving into an indispensable component of innovation strategy across the software industry. We are witnessing a paradigm shift that will have a profound impact on software platforms and ecosystems and will give rise to new forms of software co-development. In this paper we make a first attempt to discuss the evolution of the relationship between software co-development, platforms and ecosystems in the era of cloud computing, and the role of cloud application platforms. We present the case of a cloud application platform designed to support advanced forms of software co-development, and to foster the emergence of a novel type of software ecosystem. As demonstrated, cloud application platforms can be designed in a way that facilitates the emergence of new forms of hierarchical cloud-centric software ecosystems.
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    The EU green deal: Spreading or concentrating prosperity?
    (Resources, Conservation & Recycling, 2021-04-21) Arsova Sanja ; Panayiotis H Ketikidis ; Genovese Andrea ; Corpakis Dimitris
    Perspective paper - no abstract
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    Towards 6G IoT: Tracing mobile sensor nodes with deep learning clustering in UAV networks
    (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 2021-06-07) Spyridis, Yannis ; Lagkas, Thomas ; Sarigiannidis, Panagiotis ; Sarigiannidis, Panagiotis ; Zhang, Jie
    Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the role of flying anchor nodes have been proposed to assist the localisation of terrestrial Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and provide relay services in the context of the upcoming 6G networks. This paper considered the objective of tracing a mobile IoT device of unknown location, using a group of UAVs that were equipped with received signal strength indicator (RSSI) sensors. The UAVs employed measurements of the target’s radio frequency (RF) signal power to approach the target as quickly as possible. A deep learning model performed clustering in the UAV network at regular intervals, based on a graph convolutional network (GCN) architecture, which utilised information about the RSSI and the UAV positions. The number of clusters was determined dynamically at each instant using a heuristic method, and the partitions were determined by optimising an RSSI loss function. The proposed algorithm retained the clusters that approached the RF source more effectively, removing the rest of the UAVs, which returned to the base. Simulation experiments demonstrated the improvement of this method compared to a previous deterministic approach, in terms of the time required to reach the target and the total distance covered by the UAVs.
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    When pedagogic worlds collide: Reflections on a pan-European entrepreneurship education project
    (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) Penney, K. ; Bibikas, D. ; Vorley, T. ; Wapshott, R.
    hrough the Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan launched in 2013, the European Commission set out its agenda for how entrepreneurship could help tackle the problems associated with the 2008 financial crisis. In this chapter we present how STARTIFY7, a project funded by the Commission’s Horizon 2020 initiative, sought to respond to the Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan. The STARTIFY7 project was created as a thematically focused and lean-training summer academy system with the aim of creating pan-European teams of young entrepreneurs in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector. The project and its underlying pedagogic approach, derived from Neck and Greene’s (2011) work on ‘worlds’ of entrepreneurship education, is discussed along with the outcomes achieved.
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    Which BSS method separates better the EEG Signals? A comparison of five different algorithms
    (Elsevier, 2022-02) Christos Stergiadis ; Manousos A. Klados ; Vasiliki-Despoina Kostaridou
    A very common strategy for rejecting electroencephalographic (EEG) artifacts, includes the decomposition of filtered EEG signals using a Blind Source Separation (BSS) algorithm, the identification and removal of artifactual components and the reconstruction of the cleaned EEG signals. In this pipeline, the performance of the BSS algorithm, which is defined as its ability to separate properly the independent sources (like the EEG from artifactual sources), is very crucial for rejecting most of the artifacts, while maintaining the most part of EEG intact. The overwhelming majority of the published papers uses the extended INFOMAX version of Independent Component Analysis (ICA) for artifact rejection purposes. But is this the most efficient algorithm to separate EEG signals into independent components? This study comes to shed light to the aforementioned question by assessing the performance of the five most common BSS algorithms. The normalized entropy of the brain-related components, their correlation between independent components with the original sources and the amount of the overall mutual information reduction (MIR) achieved by each decomposition were computed in datasets with systematically varying numbers of electrodes (ranging from 19 tο 99), from 26 real human scalp EEG recordings. Additionally, 54 different datasets containing artificially contaminated EEG signals were also examined for the same purpose, on the basis of the Euclidean distance and the correlation, between the generated Independent Components (ICs) and the original vertical and horizontal eye signals, which were used for the contamination. The results support that the Adaptive Mixture ICA was the best performing BSS method.