The Informatics and Telematics Institute (ITI) of CERTH was founded in 1998 as a non-profit organisation under the auspices of the General Secretarial of Research and Technology of Greece (GSRT), with its head office located in Thessaloniki, Greece. It is a founding member of the CERTH also supervised by the GSRT. Important R&D activities performed by ITI-CERTH include: image and video analysis, multimedia indexing and retrieval, information retrieval and knowledge discovery for semantic-web applications, intelligent human computer interaction and intelligent agents, MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 standards.

The Thessaloniki-based Multimedia Knowledge Group (MKG) of ITI-CERTH is participating in more than 20 EC IST projects and 43 National projects, and is the co-coordinator of four EC IST projects. Over the last five years, the ITI research team has authored over 85 publications in scientific journals and over 185 presentations to international conferences. Its Athens-based Image, Video and Multimedia Systems Lab (IVML) will also collaborate in the project. It has led more than 50 European and national projects in the last decade, has authored more than 80 publications in scientific journals and over 180 in international conferences in the multimedia and knowledge technologies field.

ITI-CERTH, is participating in IST-FP6 Integrated Project aceMedia, where it has developed expertise in designing multimedia ontologies and exploiting them in the analysis of multimedia content. This expertise will be leveraged, extended, and adapted to the requirements of BOEMIE. It is also participating in the IST-FP6 NoE “Knowledge Web”, where its main role is the extension of existing ontology languages and tools to support multimedia applications. It is also involved in Greek national R&D Training Network MULTI-MINE, targeting to create a core of institutions for education-training in all areas relating to knowledge discovery and management with emphasis on multimedia. ITI-CERTH leads the IST-FP5 NoE “SCHEMA: Network of Excellence in Content-Based Semantic Scene Analysis and Information Retrieval”. It participates in the COST 292 “Semantic Multimodal Analysis of Digital Media” activity, placing emphasis on semantic learning/inference and multimodal analysis and has also participated in the former COST 211 Action focusing on exchange of information and software development in the area of multimedia coding, analysis and evaluation methodologies. This effort includes development of a test-bed for video object segmentation and tracking. as part of the voluntary Qimera initiative (www.qimera.org).