Categories: MicrosoftPersonalScholarly CommunicationsTravelZentity

A quick trip to Europe

I am off to Europe in few days. My previous team, External Research in MSR, is organizing a small event in Cambridge, UK, to discuss all the great technologies that they have been developing over the last few years, for some of which you can blame me too 🙂 I am going to focus on Zentity of course.

The event is shaping up to be a great one. As Alex said to the participants…

“… Tony will be welcoming the participants on Thursday a.m., and we plan to spend two fun-filled days walking them through the functionality, architecture, and extensibility options for 7 Office add-ins, 3 service platforms, and 1 partridge in a pear tree. We currently have participants from 5 software ISVs, 3 foundations, and 4 universities.”

It’d be great to catch up with Tony Hey, Lee Dirks, Alex Wade, and the rest of the gang while in Cambridge too! I somehow suspect that there is going to be beer-drinking at some stage 🙂 Now, why do I think that? :-))

Afterwards, I am flying to Greece for few days to see my family and friends. I am soooo excited (expect blog posts with photos :-). I am only going to stay there 4 days for two reasons: (i) I am starting with my new team tomorrow so I don’t want to be away for too long at the very beginning, (ii) I want to keep my days off for a trip to Latin America (probably Argentina) later in the year… we’ll see.

Savas Parastatidis

Savas Parastatidis works at Amazon as a Sr. Principal Engineer in Alexa AI'. Previously, he worked at Microsoft where he co-founded Cortana and led the effort as the team's architect. While at Microsoft, Savas also worked on distributed data storage and high-performance data processing technologies. He was involved in various e-Science projects while at Microsoft Research where he also investigated technologies related to knowledge representation & reasoning. Savas also worked on language understanding technologies at Facebook. Prior to joining Microsoft, Savas was a Principal Research Associate at Newcastle University where he undertook research in the areas of distributed, service-oriented computing and e-Science. He was also the Chief Software Architect at the North-East Regional e-Science Centre where he oversaw the architecture and the application of Web Services technologies for a number of large research projects. Savas worked as a Senior Software Engineer for Hewlett Packard where he co-lead the R&D effort for the industry's Web Service transactions service and protocol. You can find out more about Savas at https://savas.me/about