Dr. Vangelis Karkaletsis is the Director and Chairman of the Board of the National Centre for Scientific Research “Demokritos”, Greece’s largest multidisciplinary research centre. He represents Greece at the European Artificial Intelligence Board and serves on the High-Level Advisory Committee on AI to the Greek Prime Minister, the National Commission for Bioethics & Technoethics. Over the past two decades, Dr. Karkaletsis has worked to advance AI from isolated research to a collaborative driver of innovation across science, industry, and society. Formerly Head of the Software & Knowledge Engineering Lab (SKEL | The AI Lab) and Director of Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications, he has coordinated numerous European and national R&D projects and led major educational initiatives, including Greece’s two of the first MSc programmes in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. His vision centers on trustworthy, human-centric AI as a catalyst for societal progress, shaping policy and research through flagship initiatives such as the PHAROS AI Factory, part of the EU network of AI Factories, and Greece’s Blueprint for AI Transformation. His research interests in artificial intelligence span natural language processing, knowledge representation, and human–machine interaction.