Artificial intelligence is changing every field of technology. To give our members a place to learn and build with it, our Student Branch founded a Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) Student Branch Chapter — the first IEEE CIS student chapter in Greece.
The chapter
The IEEE CIS Student Branch Chapter of the University of Western Macedonia – Kastoria (SBC11281) was officially established on 10 December 2024 as a sub-group of our Student Branch. It focuses on computational intelligence, artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science, and its members gain experience with modern technologies by working on practical projects.
The chapter belongs to the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, an international community of about 7,000 members working on the research and applications of computational intelligence: neural networks, fuzzy systems, evolutionary computation and deep learning.
Project GNOSIS
Generative Network for Online Student Interaction and Support
GNOSIS is a digital assistant for students in the form of a chatbot. It is based on a large language model (LLM) fine-tuned specifically for our Department, and answers everyday questions such as “Where can I find the class timetable?” or “When are the university holidays?”
How it was built
- Data: the team created by hand a set of questions and answers from the Department’s official documents and website, and stored it in a PostgreSQL database so it can be updated easily.
- Model: the team compared Greek language models and chose Krikri (Llama-3.1 8B), developed by the Institute for Language and Speech Processing of the Athena Research Center, over Meltemi.
- Training: the model was fine-tuned with the open-source tool Unsloth — first experiments on Google Colab, final training on a server of the MIRANET laboratory.
- Deployment: the chatbot runs on Open WebUI, on the infrastructure of the Telecommunications, Networks and Distributed Systems Laboratory.
Through the project, members learned how to process and manage data, got to know the basics of data science, and worked with open-source tools for building AI systems.
GNOSIS is already running with limited access at gnosis.cs.uowm.gr. In the next testing period, faculty and students of the Department will gain access.
Our story
- 2024–2025: the CIS group started as one of the Branch’s projects, coordinated by Giannis Kepas.
- 10 December 2024: official establishment of the chapter; the news was celebrated with our members in March 2025.
- IEEE Day 2025 and IEEE Day 2026: the chapter presented its work and plans to students and faculty.
Join us
No previous experience is needed — only the will to learn. If you are interested in artificial intelligence, send us a message on Instagram (@ieeesbkastoria) and tell us a few words about yourself. We will figure out the rest together!
Links
- IEEE Computational Intelligence Society: https://cis.ieee.org