Vassilis Katsouros is Research Director at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) of the Athena Research Center (ATHENA RC) and Director of ILSP since June 2019. He received his M.Eng. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece, in 1992. In 1993 he obtained the M.Sc. with distinction in Communications and Signal Processing from Imperial College, University of London, UK and in 1997 he received his Ph.D. degree in Mathematical modelling and Stochastic Control from Imperial College. Since 1998 he has been working at the ILSP. He is member of the Board at Athena Research Center since 2017 and member of the Board at the Information Society S.A. since June 2019. He has coordinated several research and innovation projects at national and European frameworks. His research interests involve digital signal processing, statistics analysis, machine learning and artificial intelligence with applications in a wide variety of signals and data (document, voice, music, image, video, sensorial data, etc.) He also leads ILSP’s strategic initiative for Greek LLMs, including the development of Meltemi and Krikri, the first open LLMs designed to support and advance the Greek language in the AI era.