Data & Web Tech Conference to be Held in Chania, Greece
Chania, Greece will host the International Conference on Emerging Internet, Data & Web Technologies (EIDWT) from February 25-27, 2026. The event is scheduled to be an in-person conference for academics and professionals in the field. The conference's location coincides with a growing residential interest in nearby villages like Kounoupidiana.
- The conference's scope, which includes "Machine Learning on Large Data Sets & Massive Processing" and "Data Analytics," directly feeds into the development of autonomous systems and embodied AI, which rely on processing vast amounts of sensor data to train models for navigation and manipulation. - Professor Euripides G.M. Petrakis, the president of the conference's organizing committee, is the Director of the Intelligent Systems Laboratory at the co-organizing Technical University of Crete (TUC), which focuses on machine learning, computer vision, and robotics. - The Technical University of Crete (TUC) hosts the Intelligent Systems and Robotics Laboratory, which has a history of projects in autonomous systems. Their work includes developing autonomous navigation for electric cars, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for wildfire detection, and cooperative control for autonomous underwater vehicles. - Chania has an emerging tech scene that includes local software development companies like Nanosoft and technology solutions providers such as CreteBio. The city is also home to Insularobotics, a company that provides collaborative robots (cobots) and industrial automation solutions. - The broader island of Crete is a hub for research and development in robotics and embedded systems, with institutions like the Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH) and the Hellenic Mediterranean University's Control Systems & Robotics Laboratory located in Heraklion. - Greece is actively upgrading its defense sector with a focus on autonomous systems and AI, creating opportunities for engineers with this expertise. The country's defense modernization program encourages the development of a local industrial and technological base, with Greek companies showing strengths in these areas. - Previous iterations of the EIDWT conference have featured research applicable to robotics and autonomous systems, including papers on intelligent braking assistance for vehicles and software-defined controllers for embedded systems. - The region's focus on research is supported by the Science and Technology Park of Crete (STEP-C) in Heraklion, which hosts and supports technology startups, including those with connections to the local universities and research centers.
