The 1st Annual Meeting of the Excellence Hub GRATOS (Graph Theoretical Tools for Sciences)- EXCELLENCE/1216/0207,  was held in Nicosia on Feb 14^th 2020 at European University Cyprus with great success.  The Project EXCELLENCE/1216/0207/ GRATOS, a three-year project which started in January 2019 is  co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the Republic of Cyprus through the Research Promotion Foundation. The meeting was a great opportunity for all project partners to meet, interact, monitor and evaluate project progress for the first year of the implementation of the project.

The objective of the GRATOS project is to bring together experts from very diverse scientific domains such as Neuroscience, Astrophysics and Cosmology, with experts on Graph Theory and Discrete Mathematics in a joint research collaboration to develop efficient solutions for some important problems in clustering.  Clustering problems are some of the most important challenges in the field of Big Data and Data Science, and this illustrates not only the necessity of this project but also its sustainability through future applications of the project results in other domains.

GRATOS is a collaboration of European University Cyprus with the SME AAISCS located in Nicosia, the National Technical University of Athens, the National Observatory of Athens and the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

During the meeting, the leaders of the six work packages presented the outcomes of the 1^st year of the project as well as the next tasks to be implemented in the coming year(s) of the project. Additionally, researchers of the project gave three technical talks on advanced technological techniques and methods to be further explored during the project implementation.  More information for the project can be found in the GRATOS webpage (https://gratos.ahpc.space/).