PHAROS AI Factory, Greece’s national ecosystem for accelerating Artificial Intelligence innovation, participated in the Data Spaces Symposium 2026, held on 10-11 February 2026 in Madrid.
The Data Spaces Symposium is a leading European event dedicated to advancing the development and adoption of Common European Data Spaces, bringing together policymakers, industry leaders, researchers, and innovators to exchange best practices and strengthen cross-sector collaboration in the data economy. Its fourth edition, held under the motto “Accelerating adoption. Increasing impact.”, gathered 1.200 participants from 34 countries and focused on scaling cross-border data ecosystems while reinforcing the strategic role of European Data Spaces in enhancing competitiveness, interoperability, and trustworthy data sharing across sectors.
Representing PHAROS, Vassilis Katsouros, Director of the Institute for Language and Speech at Athena Research Center, participated in the Innovators Track session “Data Labs and AI Factories”, a focused panel exploring how data labs can serve as operational bridges between Common European Data Spaces (CEDS) and AI Factories. During the discussion, he highlighted the strategic role of Language and Culture as key verticals within the European Data Space ecosystem, underlining the importance of linking the European Language Data Space and the European Cultural Heritage Data Space with the Data Labs concept supporting AI Factory infrastructures. He also emphasised the need for AI-ready, compliant and semantically enriched datasets to support large language models (LLMs) and multimodal AI systems.
He further presented the concept of integrated Language & Culture Data Labs as operational nodes enabling cross-data space experimentation, supporting AI training and fine-tuning pipelines, and facilitating secure access to data under complex intellectual property and licensing conditions. Finally, he highlighted the alignment of these efforts with the PHAROS AI Factory, positioning Greece as an active contributor to the European AI infrastructure landscape.
Through its participation, PHAROS reaffirmed its commitment to strengthening collaboration across research, industry and European data space initiatives, contributing to the development of trustworthy, interoperable and high-impact AI ecosystems in Europe.
For further information about the Data Spaces Symposium, visit its official website here.
