INVEST ACADEMIC ADVISING FRAMEWORK PRESENTED AT IEEE EDUCON 2026 IN CAIRO

The INVEST Alliance was represented at the IEEE EDUCON 2026 Conference in Cairo, Egypt, through the presentation of the paper “A Knowledge-Grounded and Generative Framework for Personalized Academic Advising.”

The paper was presented by Omiros Iatrellis, and co-authored by Nicholas S. Samaras, Ioanna Kosmopoulou, and Theodor Panagiotakopoulos.

This participation was an important dissemination action for INVEST, bringing the alliance’s work on digital educational services, explainable AI, and student guidance to an international audience of peers in engineering education, educational technology, and higher education innovation.

The paper presents EDUC8EU, an academic advising framework developed within the INVEST European University Alliance. EDUC8EU combines ontology-based knowledge representation, semantic rule reasoning, fuzzy inference, and a grounded conversational AI layer to support transparent and personalised academic advising. The system aims to help students explore learning pathways, understand programme eligibility, identify skill gaps, and make more informed academic decisions.

Beyond the research contribution, the presentation at IEEE EDUCON served as a way to communicate INVEST’s broader work on student-centred digital transformation, interoperable educational services, and AI-supported academic guidance. It also provided an opportunity to share the alliance’s approach with the wider international community and receive visibility among researchers, educators, and professionals working on the future of higher education.