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Institute of Accelerating Systems and Applications (IASA)

Institution
IASA is a Greek autonomous legal entity governed by a Board of Directors elected by the governing bodies of the two main Athens Universities (National and Kapodistrian University and National Technical University). Its developmental program and its operating funds are directly provided by the Greek Ministry of Education which exercises direct financial oversight over the Institute. IASA is the largest research institute operating under the auspices of the Ministry of Education. It has assembled significant teams of faculty members from the university departments along with post-doctoral associates and PhD students. Many of these faculty members receive support for their work through both national and international funding sources.

Research expertise
The IASA outreach team offers access to scientific data collected by the ATLAS detector at CERN as well as to a series of interactive applications (e.g. HYPATIA) which help the citizens examine the event displays in an effort to make possible “discoveries” of new particle signatures produced at CERN’s LHC accelerator. 

Role in REINFORCE
IASA will develop a series of Citizen Science projects in which the public will look for evidence of undiscovered particles produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and collected by the huge LHC detectors. For this, it will use its expertise in developing specialized software for displaying and analyzing ATLAS data. HYPATIA, which has been developed by the
IASA team, is used every year by thousands of high school students during the IPPOG International Masterclasses. The citizens will not only look/classify images but will be able to interact with the event displays, select specific tracks, calculate invariant masses etc. There are several particle decays, such as through photon conversions, which we believe may be more accurately identified by humans rather than algorithms. It is our intention to ascertain whether this is true for those specific cases. Furthermore, the aggregation of data from thousands of Citizen Scientists will produce histograms which can indicate the possible existence of new particles.  Furthermore, the IASA group will be involved in the implementation of the demonstrator and will contribute to the assessment of the project designing tools which will automatically collect the results of the citizens’ analysis. 


Team


Professor
Christine Kourkoumelis

Christine Kourkoumelis

WP5 leader
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Christine Kourkoumelis is an Emeritus Particle Physics Professor of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA), Greece and member of IASA’s Board. She holds a Ph.D from Yale University and is actively involved in research at National (U.S.A.) and International Particle Physics laboratories. At the NKUA she is teaching both undergraduate and graduate courses, as well as, supervises several PhD students. At CERN, for the last 20 years, she is a member of the giant ATLAS experiment and contributed both in the hardware instrumentation as well as in the physics analysis (discovery of the Higgs Boson, search of new Heavy Bosons). 
She has around 1110 publications in international physics journals with more than 149,000 citations, in the 2018 Webometrics list for Highly Cited Researches (h>100) she was 217st in the world.  She has given more than 20 invited talks in international conferences.
In parallel to her research, she is heavily involved in outreach activities for the popularization and dissemination of HEP in schools. She has participated in eight European outreach programs funded within FP6/FP7/Erasmus+/Horizon 2020, two of which she coordinated. She has co-authored the ATLAS interactive event analysis program, the so-called HYPATIA (HYbrid Pupil's Analysis Tool for Interactions in ATLAS). HYPATIA is used every year, since 2011, by thousands of students participating in the International Masterclasses. She has also been the ATLAS Outreach Coordinator for two years during the excitement of the Higgs discovery and in July 2011 she was awarded the EPS (European Physical Society) outreach prize for outstanding outreach achievement.

Researcher
Stelios Vourakis

Stelios Vourakis

WP5 member
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Stelios Vourakis holds an M.Sc. in Electronic Automation with specialization in Information Technology and a Bachelor’s in Physics, both from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Since 2006 he has worked as a researcher in a series of national and EU funded projects in the departments of Informatics and Physics of the NKUA (Rhetor, Mnisiklis, Learning with ATLAS@CERN, Pathway to inquiry based science education, Discover the COSMOS, Go-Lab, Inspiring science education, Creations and Frontiers). He is the developer of the HYPATIA event display used by thousands of students worldwide during the International Physics Masterclasses and various events throughout Greece.

Research Physicist
Stelios Angelidakis

Stelios Angelidakis

WP5 member
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Stelios Angelidakis is an experimental particle physicist with large experience in physics research at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of CERN, and substantial skills in the design and development of analog processing circuits, digital signal processing and particle-track reconstruction. He is a member of the ATLAS collaboration (since 2012), and co-author of more than 690 publications in international science and instrumentation journals. His research has been focused on studies of the Higgs sector of the Standard Model as well as on searches for new-physics hypotheses. Furthermore, he has worked on the optimization of the performance of the Muon Spectrometer of the ATLAS detector, and has provided major contributions in the upgrade of the hadronic calorimeter of ATLAS, which is required for the future high-luminosity phase of the LHC.
In parallel to the above work, Dr. Angelidakis has been continuously involved in outreach projects for the dissemination of high-energy physics to the general public. He has contributed, as either a speaker or instructor, in numerous Masterclass courses of the International Particle Physics Outreach Group at the Universities of Athens and Crete (Greece), and the Clermont Auvergne University (France), and has conducted multiple local outreach seminars in remote regions of Greece. In the period 2011-2013, he was also hired by the EU project “PATHWAY” to train high-school teachers in interactive software and didactic approaches, for the introduction of scientific research in schools.

Associate professor

Dimitris Fassouliotis

WP5 member
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Dimitris Fassouliotis is associate professor at the University of Athens. He holds a PhD in elementary particle physics from NTUA (1994). Since 1998 he has been teaching undergraduate and graduate physics courses at the NKUA. Since 1989, he is participating in research activities in experimental high energy physics, first as a member of the DELPHI collaboration and later as a member of the ATTLAS collaboration at CERN. He has co-authored more than 1000 publications in the top refereed journals of his field, with more than 120,000 citations. He has given 19 invited talks given at international conferences and workshops and he has been member of the organizing committee of five international workshops. In DELPHI, he has worked mainly on precision measurements in the electroweak sector. In ATLAS, he was mainly involved in the discovery of the Higgs boson and the measurement of its properties, but also in the search for BSM physics. He has also participated in the construction of the muon spectrometer of the ATLAs detector and the development of gas micropatern detectors for its upgrade. Since 2005, Dr Fassouliotis is continuously participating in outreach activities in physics for high school students. 

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