EDUCATION
| 2011 - 2016: | Imperial College London - United Kingdom Department of Computing PhD in Computational Neuroscience Title: "Action selection in the rhythmic brain: The role of the basal ganglia and tremor." Supervisor: Prof. Murray Shanahan |
| 2010 - 2011: | Imperial College London - United Kingdom Department of Computing MSc in Computing Science Grade: Distinction Thesis (grade: Distinguished): "Spiking Neural Networks for Human-like Avatar Control in a Simulated Environment" Supervisors: Dr. David Gamez, Dr. Andreas Fidjeland |
| 2003 - 2010: | Aristotle University of Thessaloniki - Greece Department of Mathematics Bachelor Degree in Mathematics (four yearlong undergraduate course) Grade: 7.72 out of 10 Senior Thesis Projects: • "A comparison between the complexities of the games chess and go", • "An approach to the solution of the board game Eternity II",Advisor: Prof. Ioannis Antoniou |
| 2008 - 2009: | City University London - United Kingdom Department of Mathematical Science Six-month exchange in the frame of the LLP/Erasmus Programme |
WORK AND RESEARCH EXPERIENCE
| 11/2018-present: | Visiting lecturer - School of Design, Royal College of Art • Lectures on brain-inspired artificial intelligence. |
| 06/2015-present: | Research scientist, founding member - Emotech LTD • Lead design and development of the artificial intelligence engine of the personal robot Olly. |
| 04/2016-08/2018: | Research associate - Imperial College London • Part of the six-partner EU (Horizon) project "TimeStorm". • Research on human time perception/estimation, deep neural networks and episodic memory recall. • Main designer and developer of the software suite Brain Studio. |
| 09/2011-09/2017: | Teaching assistant - Department of Computing, Imperial College London. • (Teaching and supervision summarised in a later section). |
| 09/2010-03/2011: | Visitor researcher - Computational Neurodynamics Group, Imperial College London. • Research on large-scale neural cognitive systems with human-like behaviour. |
| 09/2006-07/2010: | Co-Founder, team leader, developer - PANDORA Robotics. • (2008-09) Lead of the robotic arm team. Design and construction of two mobile robotic platforms (one autonomous and one teleoperated) for the Rescue Robot League of the Robocup 2009 World Championship and Symposium. Graz, Austria. (Best European participation.) • (2007-08) Lead of the artificial intelligence team. Design and construction of an autonomous mobile robotic platform for the Rescue Robot League of the Robocup 2008 World Championship and Symposium. Suzhou, China. • (2006-07) Mechanical Design of a robotic arm. • Main programming language: C++ |
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
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Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (3 years) |
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Computational Neurodynamics (4 years) |
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Integrated Programming Laboratory (C++, Prolog, Assembly - 3 years) |
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MSc thesis by Mr Pavlos Rontidis. |
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MSc group project. Title: "OpenBG: An Open-Source Neural Network Simulation Tool" |
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MSc group project. Title: "Implementation of attentional bistability of the dragonfly visual neurons in an intelligent biomimetic flying agent." Co-supervised in collaboration with Pedro A.M. Mediano. |
AWARDS - SCHOLARSHIPS
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4 x CES 2017 Innovation Awards (smart home, drones and unmanned systems, home appliances, home audio-video accessories), for the personal robot Olly, as the lead Artificial Intelligence designer, Las Vegas, January 2017 |
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Google EMEA Scholarship for the 2014-15 academic year |
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Shortlisted for the Best Graduate Teaching Assistant Award in Student Academic Choice Awards 2014 Imperial College London (6 shortlisted out of 600 nominees). |
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Best 1st year PhD project, DoC Google Poster Competition 2013 - Imperial College London |
| • | EPSRC Doctoral Training Account (DTA) Studentship for PhD in Computing at Imperial College London (2012-2015). |
| • | Distinguished project status for MSc thesis – Imperial College London 2011 |
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Prize of Excellence and Innovation 2009. Best student participation in international competitions. Selected by the research committee of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, November 2010. |
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"Best paper (demo session) prize" (2009) for the presentation of the project "Search and Rescue Robotic Platform, development and implementation for the Robocup-Roborescue 2008 contest". Selected by the scientific board of the 3rd National Convention of Electrical and Computer Engineering Students, held in Thessaloniki 10-11 April 2009. |
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"Best paper (demo session) prize" (2008) for the presentation of the project "Construction and demonstration of a robotic arm with four degrees of freedom". Selected by the scientific board of the 2nd National Convention of Electrical and Computer Engineering Students, held in Athens 18-19 April 2008. |
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State Scholarships Foundation's scholarship holder in the frame of the LLP/Erasmus Programme. |
TECHNICAL SKILLS
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Fluent in C/C++, Qt framework, Python, Prolog, Mathematica, LATEX and SPSS. |
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Good understanding of Matlab, (Visual) Basic, PostgreSQL, Java, OpenGL and Assembly(8086). |
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Familar with CUDA, Android SDK, CLIPS, LISP and SolidWorks. |
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Fluent in various simulation tools including brian, NeuroML, NEURON, NeMo and Brain Studio. |
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Main developer of the simulation suite Brain Studio and part of the maintenance team of NeMo simulator. |
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Broad experience in the machine learning libraries scikit-learn, caffe and torch, as well as the robotics libraries MRPT and Webots. |
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONS
| 31/08-03/09/11: |
2011 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games, Seoul, South Korea Participation in 2K BotPrize 2011 (2nd place). |
| 29/06-05/07/09: |
13th RoboCup World Championship and Symposium, Graz, Austria Participation in Rescue Robot League (9th place). |
| 14-20/07/08: |
12th RoboCup World Championship and Symposium, Suzhou, China Participation in Rescue Robot League (8th place). |
INVITED TALKS AND OUTREACH
| 15/03/18: |
AI Assistant Summit London Invited talk: Imitating humans with brain-inpsired A.I. |
| 16/12/17: |
Royal Institution Christmas Lectures 2017 Presentation and demonstration of Olly the robot. |
| 22/11/17: |
Imitating human behaviour with brain-inspired artificial intelligence Talk in the Royal College of Art with Anastasia Sylaidi. (slides). |
| 12-16/07/15: |
Groningen Spring School of Cognitive Modeling, Groningen, Netherlands Demonstration and tutorial on brain studio. |
| 09/2012: |
Interview in the UK magazine New Scientist • Article: Mimicry beats consciousness in gaming’s Turing test, by Celeste Biever. |
| 09/2012: |
Interview in the UK magazine ``EDGE'' • Article: Unreal bots beat Turing test: AI players are officially more humans than gamers, by Keith Stuart. |
| 09/2012: |
Interview in the UK magazine New Scientist • Article: AI cyber-fighter: does it feel human, punk?, by Celeste Biever |
| 13-15/12/11: |
31st SGAI International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Cambridge, United Kingdom Talk and demonstration as a part of special session on 'Alan Turing and the Turing Test for Machine Intelligence'. |
| 19-23/09/09: |
19th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, Thessaloniki, Greece Demonstration of the robotic platforms of PANDORA team. |
SOCIAL ACTIVITIES AND ORGANISATIONAL SKILLS
| 2011-2013: | Co-founder and committee member of Economics Society of Imperial College London |
| 2007-2010: | President of the Chess club of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki |
| 2004-2006: | Student Representative to the Sector of Computer Sciences and Numerical Analysis Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Department of Mathematics |