Vassilis Katsouros is Research Director and Director of the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) at the Athena Research Center. He holds a PhD in Mathematical Modelling and Stochastic Control and an MSc in Communications and Signal Processing from Imperial College London, as well as an M.Eng. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens. He has led numerous national and European research and innovation projects in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and digital signal processing, focusing on the analysis of complex multimodal data such as language, speech, images, video, and documents. He currently leads ILSP’s strategic initiative for the development of open Large Language Models for Greek.