Hellenic OCR Team
Est. 11111100001members and counting...
documents processed...
Gigabytes of data...
Cups of coffee...
In late 2017, a unique crowdsourcing platform was born. The Hellenic Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Team represents the first scientific crowdsourcing initiative that aims exclusively at the processing and study of parliamentary textual data. It builds on the plain idea that a decentralized group of people can be more than the mere sum of individuals.
Our team members are virtually linked through an online exchange platform and gather regularly for monthly meetings, where problems are discussed and best practices are exchanged. Newcomers receive basic training on entering the group, while more experienced members, called ‘mentors’, provide peer-to-peer advice and support. Text processing follows a well-defined streamlined process, which is developed in order to build quality corpora of parliamentary relevance. The resulting content is brought in an open and structured format, such as XML (eXtensible Markup Language), and enables the use of novel tools and methods from the exciting field of computational linguistics.
The opportunities that arise from the study of the aforementioned corpora are tremendous, as they allow for interlinking of several – formerly distant – areas of research, such as history, political science and linguistics, thus opening up new horizons in the understanding of parliamentary data and discourse. The Hellenic OCR Team is rapidly expanding and we are looking for interested individuals to further enhance our dynamic interdisciplinary team.
We need..
- A bit of your spare time
- A lot of scientific curiosity
- Your engagement and support
We offer..
- Certified training
- Opportunity to join an international scientific network
- Early access to scientific projects
- Hands-on working experience on state-of-the-art tools and methods
Contact the Hellenic OCR Team - Become a Member
The Team
Dr. Fotis Fitsilis
Co-Founder and Team Leader
Digital policy expert
Prof. Giorgos Mikros
Co-Founder and Science Lead
Prof. Iasonas Lamprianou
University of Cyprus
Prof. Ioannis Armakolas
Comparative Politics
University of Macedonia
Marina-Eirini Kousta
International Health Policy
London School of Economics
Alexandra Fiotaki
Computational Linguist
University of Ioannina
Katerina Tzortzi
Computational Linguist
University of Crete
Polytimi Mountanea
International Political Economy
Eleni Zisioglou
Legal expert
Ioannis Gianniadis
Digital Identity Specialist
Panagiotis Papantonakis
Electrical and Computer Engineering student
Prof. Christos G. Alexopoulos
Academy of Applied Preschool Teaching and Health Studies
Vasileios Kesidis
Trainee
Dr. Ilias Spais
Senior Research Associate
Helen Papastrati
Thesis π Schools (Founder/Director)
Chiara Spiniello PhD
Legal professional
Maria-Eleni Georgoulea
Student of Law
Antonino Nielfi
parliamentary researcher
Dr. Alicia Pastor y Camarasa
Legal Scholar of Public Law
Anna Maria Zikou
Legal professional
Democritus University of Thrace
Spyridoula-Anna Pappa
Italian Philology
University of Athens
Dr. Michael Fitsilis
Software developer
RWTH Aachen
Sotiris Leventis
Director
Dimitris Garantziotis
Legal expert
University of Athens
Dr Maria Kamilaki
Linguist
Alexandros Tsomarelis
Technical Solutions & Crypto Enthusiast
Vasileios Anastasiou
Software developer
Dr Afroditi Giovani
Linguist
Dr. Vasilis Tountopoulos
Senior ICT consultant
Luís Kimaid
Political Scientist
Bruce Todd
Specialist in justice & home affairs
Antonia Becou
Graphic designer
Dora Kallipolitou
Expert in circular economy
Natasa Theochari
Italian Philology and Literature
University of Athens
Alexandros Fikas
Italian Philology
University of Athens
Eleni Tsaireli
Contemporary European Studies
Foteini Kakaitsa
Postgraduate studies Italian Philology
Konstantinos Tsiaras
Computer Science
University of Athens
Ioanna Asanakidi
Linguist
Evangelos Dimiou
Undergraduate Student of Political Science
Elias Tsironis
Cloud architect
Panagiotis Patalas
Electrical Engineer, Sustainable Energy Solutions
Leonidas Kallipolitis
Senior Software Engineer
Prof. Enrico Borghetto
Political & Social Sciences
Prof. Jörn von Lucke
The Open Government Institute
Yiannis Armenakis
Legal advisor and investigator
Prof. Iraklis Varlamis
Data Management
Athanasia Pliakogianni
Political Science
University of Bamberg
Anna Karampali
Computational Linguistics Lab
University of Athens
Sotiris Kranias
Computational Social Science
Franco Gatti
PhD Student in Italian Linguistics
Paraskevi Tsimpouki
Linguist
University of Athens
Apostolos Dalas, M.Sc.
Electrical and Electronics Engineer
Prof. Juan de Dios Cincunegui
Parliamentary Law and Diplomacy
Irene Theodoropoulou
Associate Professor of Linguistics
Dimitris Koryzis
Systems Engineer & art curator
Prof. Vilelmini Sosoni
Translation and Linguist
Prof. Renato Ibrido
Legal Sciences
Dr. Muhamad Sayuti Hassan
Senior Lecturer of Law
Prof. Stéphane Gagnon
Government and Legal Informatics
Christina Tasouli
Legal Expert
Institutional Members
Member Locations
Athens
– Hellenic Parliament
– National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
– SW development, private sector
Komotini
Democritus University of Thrace
Nicosia
University of Cyprus
Thessaloniki
University of Macedonia
Coventry
Warwick University
Padova
Padova University
London
London School of Economics
Friedrichshafen
SW development, private sector
Doha
Hamad Bin Khalifa University
Huddersfield
Hansard at Huddersfield
Patras Science Park
Kavala City
Krusevac City
Montreal City
Luxembourg
Organization
La Universidad Austral
Bússola Tech
BitNomos S.R.L.
Università degli Studi di Firenze
Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
POPVOX, INC.
Université du Québec en Outaouais
Institute of Parliamentarism
Uxabay
Our Blog
hellenicOCRteam.gr/blog4th Global Conference on Parliamentary Studies – Call for Papers
CALL FOR PAPERS
4th Global Conference on Parliamentary Studies
The organizing committee of the 4th Global Conference on Parliamentary Studies invites submissions of papers for a unique event to be held in Athens, Greece, on Friday, 13 June 2025.
ARPC workshop
A workshop on “Advanced analysis and recognition of parliamentary corpora” (ARPC) will be organized at the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition conference (ICDAR 2024), which will take place is Athens, Greece. The ARPC workshop will be held on Saturday, 31 August 2024.
Call for Papers: ARPC workshop at the ICDAR 2024
CALL FOR PAPERS (UPDATED)
Workshop on
Advanced analysis and recognition of parliamentary corpora (ARPC)
The ARPC organizing committee invites papers for the workshop to be held in physical format during the ICDAR 2024 conference in Athens, Greece. The ARPC workshop will be held on Saturday, 31 August 2024.
TOGI partners with the Hellenic OCR Team
The Hellenic OCR Team and The Open Government Institute at Zeppelin University announce their partnership.
Celebrating 60 members
In December 2022, five years after its establishment, the Hellenic OCR Team achieved another significant milestone by reaching 60 members.
To BHMA presents feature story on Smart Parliaments
Greece’s major newspaper TO ΒΗΜΑ TΗΣ ΚΥΡΙΑΚΗΣ included on 27 November 2022 an impressive story on the occasion of the publication of the edited volume titled Smart Parliaments: Data-Driven Parliament (Brussels: European Liberal Forum) by the Hellenic OCR Team.
Edited Volume on Smart Parliaments
The Hellenic OCR Team is incredibly proud to announce the publication of its first collective authoring effort titled Smart Parliament: Data-driven Democracy. The book is jointly edited by the Team’s co-founders, Fotis Fitsilis and George Mikros. The book is published by the European Liberal Forum as part of its Techno-Politics Series.
Supporting the LegisTech Forum 2022
The Hellenic OCR Team supported the organization and implementation of the 2022 LegisTech Forum, which took place on 12-16 September 2022. The Forum was put together by our long-time partner Bússola Tech.
AI Workshop in Argentina
On 31 August 2022 the Hellenic OCR Team organized jointly with The Open Government Institute of Zeppelin Universität, a special workshop for the Honorable Chamber of Deputies of Argentina to collect empirical evidence for the future institutional use of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Our Team at Wroxton
The Hellenic OCR Team was represented by four of its members at the prestigious Wroxton Workshop of Parliamentary Scholars and Parliamentarians (15th edition, 30-31 July 2022, Wroxton, UK).
Hellenic OCR Team award
A great moment at the International Workshop of Scholars and Parliamentarians that took place in Villa La Angostura, Argentina, on 7-8 September 2022. The Hellenic OCR Team award for “Excellence in Parliamentary Studies” has been awarded for the first time!
BISON in the room
We have a BISON in our team! The Hellenic OCR Team partners with the Business Intelligence and Social Innovation (BISON) research group of the University of the Peloponnese, Greece, to further extend its global expert and institutions network.
A dedicated volume on the Hellenic OCR Team
After years in planning, the Hellenic OCR Team came to an agreement with the European Liberal Forum to publish an edited volume exclusively dedicated to the study of parliaments.
New benchmarks reached
In late 2021, the Hellenic OCR Team made two new benchmarks! In November, it celebrated its fourth anniversary and, shortly after, it reached 50 active members.
Diversifying LEOS
Hellenic OCR Team continues its tireless efforts on the transformation of parliamentary control. Sotiris Leventis, Vasileios Anastasiou and Fotis Fitsilis have used a modified Legislation Editing Open Software (LEOS) entity as the primary system, which was linked through software agents to an independent data source.
Flagship article out at last!
Hellenic OCR Team co-founders Fotis Fitsilis and George Mikros have published their latest open access article in the Journal of Open Humanities Data! This is the flagship publication on the science and methods behind the Team’s unique composition and approach.
New partnership with BitNomos
BitNomos, a Bologna-based company aiming at digitalizing deliberate societies, and the Hellenic OCR Team, a scientific crowdsourcing initiative and an expert network for the processing and analysis of governance and parliamentary data, are announcing their cooperation.
Emerging technologies
The Hellenic OCR Team continues its aggressive research strategy within the greater ParlTech domain by initializing three proofs-of-concept on emerging technologies: recommender systems, artificial intelligence and blockchain.
New partnership
May 2021 newsletter #10
The Hellenic OCR Team’s May 2021 newsletter is out – our 10th! It includes rich but concise information about the Team’s activities during the past quarter.
Ground-breaking paper from the Team
Hellenic OCR Team members Fotis Fitsilis and Apostolos Dalas joined forces with Dimitris Koryzis and Dimitris Spiliotopoulos to come up with a state-of-the-art contribution on Parliamentary Technology, or ParlTech, just published on Big Data and Cognitive Computing, an MDPI journal.
Rule as Code
In February 2021, SmartLegal and the Hellenic OCR Team joined forces to use the Rule-as-Code approach on Greek legislation! Using SmartLegal’s platform, an existing law will be transformed into machine-consumable language (code). This proof-of-concept, applied on a Greek law for the first time, has the potential to deliver better, digital ready regulations that can be tested before actual implementation.
January 2021 newsletter
Becoming an expert network
In the advent of 2021, the Hellenic OCR Team is initiating its transition from a crowdsourcing initiative towards a structured expert network for the processing and analysis of government and parliamentary data.
36 months of operation
October 2020 newsletter
The Hellenic OCR Team October 2020 newsletter (#8) is out! This time on the menu: a new milestone, a huge boost in transparency, networking and significant contributions to scientific literature.
Partnership with LUDCI.eu
Newly Launched Diplomacy and Communications Institute, LUDCI.eu, and the Hellenic Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Team announce partnership.
A new milestone!
The Hellenic OCR Team reaches a new milestone! Today, we proudly celebrate our expansion to 40 members. As of now, our Team has 36 individual and four institutional members that closely cooperate to achieve a set of greater goals, such as data openness, systemic interoperability and digital transformation of parliamentary institutions. read more…
A Joinup solution
The Hellenic OCR Team, an innovative crowdsourcing platform for the processing and analysis of parliamentary data and more…, now appears as a solution at Joinup, EU’s collaborative platform for Interoperability solutions for public administrations, businesses and citizens under the ISA2 Programme.
Digital Humanities 2020 poster
At this year’s Digital Humanities 2020 (virtual) conference, between 20 and 24 of July, the Hellenic OCR Team presented a poster on Xtralingua, our latest digital tool for extracting quantitative text profiles.
Hellenic OCR Team – Hypernetica joint announcement
The Hellenic OCR Team, the world’s first crowdsourcing initiative for the processing and analysis of parliamentary data, and Hypernetica, an emerging provider of business process automation and interoperability software solutions, join forces to commonly tackle legal informatics challenges in the parliamentary environment and in public governance at large.
Hellenic OCR Team members produce top-notch research on SDGs
The article titled “How parliaments monitor sustainable development goals – a ground for application of post legislative scrutiny” that appeared on June 4, 2020 in The Journal of Legislative Studies includes top-notch research by members of the Hellenic OCR Team.
Hellenic OCR Team enters EU’s Transparency Register
The Hellenic OCR Team hereby announces that it entered the EU’s Transparency Register, a system of transparency that is operated jointly by the European Parliament and the European Commission.
May 2020 newsletter
Our May 2020 newsletter (#7) is finally there and includes major steps of our aggressive evolutionary process, such as ramping up software development, concluding parliamentary control sampling, initiation of cooperation with European Commission instances and partnerships with Hypernetica and Hansard at Huddersfield.
Working on LEOS
On 29 April 2020, our development team, i.e. Sotiris Leventis, Konstantinos Tsiaras, Panagiotis Papantonakis and Dr. Fotios Fitsilis, had the opportunity to participate to an online workshop for LEOS – Legislation Editing Open Software organized by DG DIGIT at the European Commission.
Stay home: video message
This is a social message by the Hellenic OCR Team. In view of the novel coronavirus pandemic, please STAY HOME. STAY SAFE. Watch the video below.
Summer of Code 2020
Here we go again! Following successful project implementation during GSOC 2019, the Hellenic OCR Team and its partners have proposed two new exciting software development projects to org admin GFOSS! Interested students are kindly requested to express their interest at any time.
Our presence in the press: TA NEA Weekend
An interesting reportage by Marnie Papamattheou on the Hellenic OCR Team and our innovative crowd sourcing approach to parliamentary data appeared today February 1st, 2020, at the weekend edition of the newspaper “TA NEA”.
Second anniversary meeting – the real thing!
It has been a fruitful anniversary team meeting on Wednesday 22 January 2020 at the Found.ation! After two years in operation, the Hellenic OCR Team now counts 31 members in seven countries, 11 team meetings, six newsletters, and -most importantly- approx. 40K of processed parliamentary control documents.
Second anniversary meeting – announcement
Our second anniversary meeting is ante portas! Enter the Found.ation on the 22th of January and learn about the team, our achievements and goals. The agenda shall include a short presentation by the initiative’s main stakeholders, lightning talks by our members and a developer’s forum to plan for the next steps.
It’s our second anniversary!
Something big happened back in November 2017; our scientific crowdsourcing initiative, the Hellenic OCR Team, came to life! This November, members and supporters celebrate our second anniversary. Look out for a special monthly meetup and get introduced into the state-of-the-art processing and analysis of parliamentary data.
To άρθρο του Παναγιώτη Παπαντωνάκη για το GSoC 2019
Στα πλαίσια του Google Summer of Code 2019 αναπτύχθηκε για το Hellenic OCR Team ένα πρόγραμμα Windows για την εξαγωγή γλωσσικών χαρακτηριστικών από αρχεία κειμένου με τίτλο Development of a Tool for Extracting Quantitative Text Profiles. Διαβάστε στο blog της ομάδας εργασίας για το ανοικτό λογισμικό το σχετικό κείμενο του μέλους μας Παναγιώτη Παπαντωνάκη.
Our cooperation with Hansard at Huddersfield
The Hellenic OCR Team announces its cooperation with the Hansard at Huddersfield, a project that aims to provide an easily searchable web-version of Hansard using interactive visualisations and simplified linguistic software to search large databases.
Celebrating 30 members!
The next milestone is reached: the Hellenic OCR Team is now 30 members strong! With the combined force of 28 experts and two institutional members, the Patras Science Park and the Hansard at Huddersfield project, our Team is more than ever in the position to tackle its goals.
IPU’s innovation tracker
The Hellenic OCR Team is featured in the latest (#3) IPU’s Innovation Tracker with an article titled “Hellenic parliament: Making past parliamentary data usable through crowdsourcing”. Enjoy responsibly in English and French!
September 2019 Newsletter
Our September 2019 newsletter (#6) is out … and what a busy summer this has been! A plethora of activities is presented therein, from our participation to the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2019 to the expansion of our operations in new and exciting sectors.
Participation to Open Science working group
The Hellenic OCR Team participates in the Open Science working group, which constitutes an initiative of the ATHENA Research and Innovation Center.
Hellenic OCR Team supports Post-Legislative Scrutiny
The Hellenic OCR Team signs the London Declaration on Post-Legislative Scrutiny!
GSoC 2019 tool ready for use!
The Hellenic OCR Team announces the finalization of the software development project Tool for Extracting Quantitative Text Profiles. The code was developed by Panagiotis Papantonakis for GSoC 2019. Project management was undertaken by Hellenic OCR Team members, so called mentors.
April 2019 newsletter and more…
Check out our newsletter no.5 (April 2019) for more information on current operations of the Hellenic OCR Team as well as details of our future activities.