 Good morning and a very warm welcome. Calimera che calosirzate. Please allow me to continue with the Ligua Franca of this symposium that will be in English. My name is Petros Koumuchakos. I'm a professor at Harvard University and currently I'm also serving as the chair of the board of the Hellenic Institute of Advanced Studies. We have a full program today so I will not bother you with a lot of details. We are sorry that the president of the Hellenic Republic is not able to attend today. However, she prepared a short statement and I would like to invite here Vasylina Stubos. Vasylina has been one of the best students of the National Techian University of Athens and like many of us is actually following the same path and the same journey that we do and she will be next year a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which is the other university in Boston. So please welcome Vasylina. Good morning. I'm going to read out to you the welcome remarks by the president of the Hellenic Republic, Mrs. Sakella Ropoulou. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to welcome you in Athens for this significant inaugural symposium of the Hellenic Institute of Advanced Studies. So many distinguished participants are present specializing in cutting edge themes such as artificial intelligence and computing or energy and climate, issues that preoccupies us all in these challenging times. I am confident that this exchange of ideas at the highest scientific level will prove to be fruitful and inspiring, especially for young scientists in Greece. Greece aspires to become even more outward looking than in the past and establish itself internationally as an innovation and research hub attractive to high skilled workers, entrepreneurs, digital nomads and people from all over the world who will choose to live and be creative here. Our existing human capital also deserves attention and support as our full potential needs to be exploited for their own sake, but also to the benefit of our nation. Facilitating contact and interaction between prominent Greek scientists and researchers working and excelling abroad and their peers in our country could contribute substantially to the development of scientific excellence here in Greece. In this light, praiseworthy initiatives like yours must be encouraged and promoted as much as possible. Moreover, another issue also needs to be addressed. Unfortunately, during the past years, Greece has suffered from a brain drain in almost all scientific fields, mostly due to the economic crisis. Important and serious efforts have already been made to reverse this deploring situation and transform it into brain gain. The time is ripe to do our best to repatriate our lost generation of young scientists forced to live abroad. Forging relations and building bridges between our omnipresent and renowned scientific diaspora and their Greek colleagues is the first and necessary step that we must take in order to achieve this goal. I wish every success to the symposium and to the discussions that will follow.