George Carayannis is currently Professor Emeritus at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University or Athens, which he has served  since 1984. He founded the Institute for Language and Speech Processing in 1992 and was its Director until 2003.  In 2003 he was appointed Director General and President of the Board of Directors of the Athena Research and Innovation Center and held this position until 2010.

George Carayannis received the Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the NTUA in 1969, and the French DEA degrees in Nuclear Reactor Physics and Computer Science from the University of Paris, in 1970 and 1971 respectively. He obtained the French Docteur-Ingenieur degree in Computer Science from the University of Paris in 1973 and the Docteur es Sciences degree in Physics from Orsay University in 1978.

He was with the École Nationale Supérieure  des Telecommunications in Paris from 1971 to 1974 and with the Université libre de Bruxelles from 1974 to 1978. From 1978 to 1980 he worked for the Research center of National Defense in Athens as project leader developing speech processing technology. He joined the NTUA in 1980 as Research Fellow and from 1981 to 1983 he worked for the Council of Europe as Secretary of the European Joint Committee for Scientific Co-operation, a committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. He was a member of the ESPRIT and IT&C Management Committees for two years period (1990-1992). He was a member of the Language Engineering Working Party of the Telematics Management Committee and an expert of the INFO2000 / MLIS Committee for Language Technology issues. He submitted the Greek national report on educational matters to the 28th session of the UNESCO General Conference in October 1995. He represented Greece in the European Commission Task Force on multimedia educational software and compiled the Greek national report. He has coordinated many national and European projects related to language processing and speech processing. He is experienced in the evaluation of research projects and European programs (ESPRIT, TIDE, DELTA, etc.) He was an advisor to the Greek Ministry of Presidency in matters related to the introduction of new technologies in the public sector and the simplification of administration procedures (1994-1995) and President of the Greek Pedagogical Institute from August 1995 to December 1996. He was the head of the Greek research unit involved in the machine translation project of the European Communities (EUROTRA 1989-1993).

His research interests include Digital Signal Processing (DSP), Computational Complexity and Fast Algorithms in DSP, Speech Analysis and Synthesis, Biological Signal Processing, Image and Speech recognition, Multimedia information systems, Linguistic Processing and Educational Technologies. He has published over 140 research papers related to these topics. He has also been involved in the design of educational technology products mainly for language teaching as well as in the design of language & speech technology products.

Professor Carayannis has been teaching courses on signal and system theory, digital signal processing, pattern recognition and man-machine communication at undergraduate and postgraduate levels and has supervised numerous Ph.D. theses on pattern recognition and signal processing.  He was among the founding members of “Technoglossia”, the first post graduate interdisciplinary programme in language engineering in Greece, that involves the Department of Linguistics of the University of Athens and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens.

He was an instructor of a series of CEI-Europe/Elsevier specialized courses for the European industry on fast algorithms for adaptive signal processing.  He was for many years a member of the Editorial Board of the European Technical Journal “Signal Processing”. He is a founding member of the Greek “technology assessment” association (1995). He is also a founding member of the European Language Resources Association (1995).

George Carayannis is a member of the Technical Chamber of Greece, the IEEE and EURASIP.