Turn down the volume! Noise in everyday life is a significant and growing problem that, according to the World Health Organisation, is responsible for many healthy years of life lost [1]. And it is not just traffic,mobile devices or so-called personal music equipment that is responsible, but speech itself. Anyone unfortunate enough to spend much time at a public transport interchange or airport is assailed by loud, distorted and repetitive announcements. Keeping the volume high is the easy way to ensure that anyone listening gets the message, especially in noisy environments, but is it the smartest solution?

The paper entitled "Programming Smart Object Federations for Simulating and Implementing Ambient Intelligence Scenarios", presented by Ioannis Georgalis, PhD Candidate at the University of Crete and member of the HCI Laboratory of ICS-FORTH, received the Best Student Paper Award at the 3rd International Conference on Pervasive and Embedded Computing and Communications Systems (PECCS 2013, Barcelona, Spain 19-21 February 2013).

Researchers at the Institute of Computer Science (ICS) Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH) received the First Award in the "Gesture Recognition Challenge" contest with their work titled "Giving a hand to Kinect"

TCM2012 took place in Crete in October 21-26, 2012

The workshop will be held in the amphitheatre of FORTH on Thursday, October 11 at 10:00

John Pendry, David Smith and Costas Soukoulis (IESL-FORTH) won the 2013 McGroddy Prize for New Materials, awarded by the American Physical Society

For the first time in Crete, a complete coastline survey is performed, using a scientific approach with new, high reliability, methods and technologies in order to investigate the beach erosion phenomenon that is evident across the island. The Eastern Crete Development Organization (OANAK) is the project coordinator and the Department of Geography and Climatology of the University of Athens, the Institute of Applied & Computational Mathematics of FORTH and the Department of Marine Sciences of The University of Aegean are active participants.