The Centre for Research and Technology Hellas - CERTH,

is a legal non-profit organized under private law, under the auspices of the General Secretariat for Research and Technology (GSRT), of the Greek Ministry of Development. CERTH was founded in March 2000, with the mission to carry out basic and applied research with special emphasis in exploiting research results and developing new products and services with industrial, economic and social impact. CERTH is housed in its own building facilities at Thermi, a township 12 kilometers from the city center of Thessaloniki, the second largest city in Greece.

CERTH's structure includes the Central Directorate and five Research Institutes, one of them is the Informatics and Telematics Institute - ITI  (Founded in 1998).

The main goal of the ITI is to achieve scientific and research excellence in its areas of interest by developing the appropriate conditions that will motivate the conduct of basic, applied and technological research focusing in informatics, telematics and telecommunications. Indicative research areas of interest include: Information Processing, Advanced e-Services for the Knowledge Society, Virtual Reality, and Telecommunications.

The Distributed Systems Lab

conducts research and development in the areas of: Middleware technologies and Mobile Computing, Knowledge-based systems, Grid computing, e-Science technologies, Global scientific metacomputing, Environmental informatics, e-Services and Digital Libraries, Semantic web, Scientific Computing & Parallel and Distributed Processing, Ubiquitous and pervasive computing, Wearable computers and mobile devices, Electronic commerce.

The head of the Distributed Systems Lab is Prof. Catherine Houstis. Members of the Distributed Systems Lab have participated in many International and EU funded projects, and have coordinated several of them.