Updated: 1 June 2008

Objective

Become a world-leading expert and be known for the high-quality research and development work in the area of knowledge representation, management, and processing at scale. Lead the architecture, design, and development of technologies to enable an ecosystem of "knowledge-aware" Internet services and applications.

Interests

• The Internet as a platform to support users who are equally producers and consumers of semantically rich, machine-processable, and, why not, machine-interpretable information. Apply "data networking" techniques in general-purpose computing for the next generation of knowledge-driven applications.
• Distributed, high-performance, scalable computing. The use of the Internet as the platform for hosting/running consumer-, scientific-, and business-oriented applications. Dealing with all the problems associated with designing, developing, deploying, and maintaining the infrastructure to support the next generation of Internet applications.

Profile

• Architecture, program management, and prototyping work in Microsoft Research's External Research group and Microsoft's Connected System Division architecture team.
• Architecture, research, and prototyping work for one of UK's regional e-Science centers. Responsible for the technical vision, technology adoption, and design work for bio-informatics, neuro-informatics, astronomy, etc. related applications. Interactions with scientists and analysis of their application and infrastructure requirements. Built prototypes demonstrating ideas for composing Internet-scale scientific applications.
• PhD and post-doctoral research in the area of software-based support for high-performance, distributed-memory, parallel architectures.
• Management of research and Grid-related infrastructure teams.
• Extensive knowledge of Web Services standards and specifications. Author of suite of specifications for describing the messaging behavior of services (SOAP Service Description Language, SSDL, http://ssdl.org). Owned the WS-MetadataExchange and WS-Transfer on behalf of Connected System Division's architecture team. Worked on the OASIS WS-Business Transaction Protocol (the first Web Services-based protocol for transactions).
• Technical writer/blogger and author of many publications. Able presenter and communicator of new ideas and research work.

Professional/Research Experience

Architect (Nov. 2006 - today) - Microsoft Corporation

I joined Microsoft's Technical Computing Group, reporting to Corporate Vice President Tony Hey, in order to work on technologies, services, and tools that help scientists and researchers be more productive and efficient. I've been awarded with a "Gold Star", which is Microsoft's recognition for high achievement and quality of work. Highlights:

• Architecture and development of a semantic computing platform for storing and managing the research output of an organization;
• Program management of the Microsoft-Intel joined sponsorship of the Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers;
• Design and development of plugins for Office (to be announced soon);
• Interactions with leading scientists worldwide
• Whitepapers about the future of computing for science, social networking, and semantics that reached Bill Gates who positively commented on them.

Program Manager (2005 - Oct. 2006) - Microsoft Corporation

I joined Microsoft's Connected Systems Division architecture team to investigate possible directions for the next generation development platform.

• While working for Brad Lovering's team of architects, I gained valuable experience on how Microsoft technologies move from ideas and prototypes to products. I was also given the chance to own two Web Services specifications and lead the necessary technical work and negotiations with IBM.

Principal Research Associate (2003 - 2005) - School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle

My research while at the University of Newcastle focused in the areas of service-oriented, distributed, high-performance computing with an emphasis on Internet-scale architectures. The focal point of my investigations was the articulation of architectural principles for Internet-scale computing and how they could be applied using Web Services technologies.

Chief Software Architect (2003 - 2005) - North-East Regional e-Science Centre (NEReSC), University of Newcastle

In addition to being a principal research associate, I was also NEReSC's chief software architect. NEReSC was involved in a large number of high-profile projects in the areas of data-intensive computing, bioinformatics, virtual organizations, and high-performance, distributed computing. My architectural duties included involvement with all the centre's research projects during their design and architecture phases, setting the direction in terms of the set of technologies used for all implementations, and providing advice on Web and Grid standards and specifications.

Private (2001 - 2002) - Greek army

Fulfillment of the military service duty (awarded a distinction of honor). Although my duties in the Greek army were not related to computing science, I experienced the disciplined life of an army and learned how to work within a team.

Senior Software Engineer (2001) - Hewlett Packard

Co-investigator in an R&D team in the area of Transactions for Web Services. Principal role in the research, design, and implementation of the XML Transaction Service (XTS) the prototype on which the HP-WTS 1.0 product was based.

Research Associate - Dep. of Computing Science, University of Newcastle

Post-doctoral research in the area of parallel, high-performance computing using clusters of workstations and object-oriented, visual programming languages for parallel computing.

Education

Doctor of Philosophy in Computing Science (1996 - 2000)
University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Doctor of Philosophy in Computing Science (funded by the University's Research Services Unit). Title of PhD thesis: Run-time Support for Parallel Object-Oriented Computing.

• The research work involved the implementation of an all in software object-based DSM system, novel object caching techniques for distributed systems, and a new lazy task creation technique. The thesis dealt with design and implementation issues in the areas of load-balancing, high-speed communications, and clustering.

Master of Science (1995 - 1996)
University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Master of Science in Computing Software and Systems Design. Achieved highest marks in year. My dissertation work was in the area of run time support for mobile agents.

Bachelor of Science (1991 - 1995)
Dep. of Software Engineering, Technology Educational Institute of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece

Bachelor of Science in Information Technology (final year project on DNS and sendmail was awarded with distinction).

Community Participation

Workshop Organizer

• Manycore Computing Workshop 07
• Building Service Based Grids - GGF 11
• Experiences and Future Challenges in Building Grids from Open Standards - UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2004
• Service Grids: Current Activity & Middleware Requirements
• e-Science Workflow Services

Journal Reviewer/Editor (sample)

• ACM Transactions on Internet
• IEEE Distributed Systems Online
• International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management, special issue on 'Middleware for Web Services'
• Journal of Web Services Research, Guest Editor
• Journal of Web Services Research, Review Board Member

Conference Program Committee Member (sample)

• WWW 2006, 2007
• Grid 2006: 7th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Grid Computing
• Cluster Computing and Grid 2005, 2006, 2007

Professional Memberships

• Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), since 1996
• IEEE Computer, since 1996
• Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), since 1996