GEOPONIKO PANEPISTIMION ATHINON

The Agricultural University of Athens (AUA) is the 3rd oldest University in Greece. Since 1920, it has made a continuous contribution to the Greek & European primary sector development by conducting basic and applied research in the agriculture-related sciences and having been involved in one third of the agricultural research in Greece. The University is located in a green campus close to the Acropolis, at the heart of the ancient Olive Grove. It has academic personnel of 178 people, 300 people supportive staff, 5,000 undergraduate students, 450 MSc students, and 250 PhD students. AUA’s research funding comes from the private sector, as well EU and Greek research projects. Its contribution spans across a wide range of topics such as food quality and safety, water resource conservation, organic farming, exploitation of alternative energy sources, biotechnological applications in Agriculture, and information and Communications technologies. 

AUA will be represented in the project by the Smart Farming Technology Group (SFTGroup), which belongs to the Department of Natural Resources Development and Agricultural Engineering. The SFTGroup has been involved in 25 H2020 projects, with Spyros Fountas as coordinator or scientific representative. The most important educational projects are ERAMSUS+ Agr-ICT (2018-2021) and the national project New Agriculture for the New Generation (2019-2020). SFTGroup is the coordinator of the EU H2020 OPTIMA Project (2018 – 2022), which is about the development of an Optimised Integrated Pest Management system to precisely detect and control plant diseases in perennial crops and open-field vegetables. The SFTGroup has successfully coordinated the Smart-AKIS Thematic Network on innovation-driven research in Smart Farming technologies (2016 – 2018) and the GATES project about the development of a serious game for Precision Agriculture methods adoption in the EU (2017-2019). It is also WP leader in the BigDataGrapes (2018 – 2020) and Innoseta (2018-2021) on solutions for optimized spraying applications, PLOUTOS (2020-2022) organizing large scale pilots and collaboration with other projects. Other projects with significant participation are IoF2020 (2017 – 2020), ROBS4CROS (2021-2024) and APOLLO (2016 – 2019). SFTGroup is also member in Horizon Europe projects such as ICAERUS (2022-2026), BEATLES (2022-2026) in the role of Coordinator and as a partner in projects like EU-Farmbook(2022-2029), ClimateFarmDemo (2022-2029), modern-AKIS (2022-2029). Finally, SFTGroup has been contacting various commercial projects with leading companies, such as CORTEVA, JohnDeere and COMPO. In addition, the group has been responsible for the digitization of the New CAP for the Greek Ministry of Agriculture.

For these activities more information can be found online at:
https://www2.aua.gr/en and https://www.linkedin.com/company/sftgaua/