Dr. Ioannis Pitas

This lecture overviews decentralized and distributed DNN architectures and their implementation in cloud/edge environments. Big data analysis can be greatly facilitated if decentralized/distributed DNN architectures are employed that interact with each other for DNN training and/or inference using the human Teacher-Student education paradigm. A novel Learning-by-Education Node Community (LENC) framework is presented that facilitates communication and knowledge exchange among diverse Deep Neural Networks (DNN) agents, undertaking the role of a student or teacher DNN by offering or absorbing knowledge respectively. The framework enables efficient and effective knowledge transfer among participating DNN agents while enhancing their learning capabilities and fostering their collaboration among diverse networks. The proposed framework addresses the challenges of handling diverse training data distributions and the limitations of individual DNN agent learning abilities. The LENC framework ensures the exploitation of the best available teacher knowledge upon learning a new task and protects the DNN agents from catastrophic forgetting. The experiments demonstrate the LENC framework functionalities on multiple teacher-student learning techniques and their integration with lifelong learning. Our experiments manifest the LEMA framework’s ability to maximize the accuracy of all participating DNN agents in classification tasks by leveraging the collaborative knowledge of the framework. A LENC framework implementation in cloud/edge environments is also overviewed. Applications are presented in big visual data analysis tasks for Natural Disaster Management.

Ioannis Pitas (IEEE fellow, IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, EURASIP fellow) received the Diploma and PhD degree in Electrical Engineering, both from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH), Greece. He is Principal Researcher at AUTH and CERTH/ITI. In the period 1994-2025, he has been a Professor at the Department of Informatics of AUTH. He has been Director of the Artificial Intelligence and Information Analysis (AIIA) lab (1999-2025). He has served as a Visiting Professor at several Universities. He is Principal Researcher in AUTH and CERTH/ITI.
His current interests are in the areas of computer vision, machine learning, autonomous systems, intelligent digital media, image/video processing, human-centred computing, affective computing, 3D imaging and biomedical imaging. He has published over 980 papers, contributed to 48 books in his areas of interest and edited or (co-)authored another 16 books. He has also been member of the program committee of many scientific conferences and workshops. In the past he served as Associate Editor or co-Editor of 23 international journals and General or Technical Chair of 5 international conferences. He delivered 171 keynote/invited speeches worldwide. He co-organized 38 conferences and participated in technical committees of 291 conferences. He participated in 75+ R&D projects, primarily funded by the European Union and is/was principal investigator in 47 such projects. He is the coordinator of the Horizon Europe R&D project TEMA ( https://tema-project.eu/).
He is chair of the International AI Doctoral Academy (AIDA) https://www.i-aida.org/. He was chair and initiator of the IEEE Autonomous Systems Initiative https://ieeeasi.signalprocessingsociety.org/. He has 39400+ citations to his work and h-index 94. According to https://research.com/ he is ranked first in Greece and 319 worldwide in the field of Computer Science (2022).

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Meeting ID: 997 2067 1240
Passcode: 114050