Categories: MicrosoftPersonalScholarly CommunicationsTravelZentity

First part of my European trip

Despite a rocky start to the trip due to the jet-lag and a cold, I now feel so much better and I am ready (and very excited) to see my family and friends in Greece. I am currently at the British lounge at Gatwick, waiting for my flight.

The meeting in Cambridge went great. The presentation went smooth and ALL my demos worked flawlessly, which must have been a first 🙂 We got some nice feedback and there seemed to be genuine interest in Zentity. Alex Wade did an amazing job running the meeting and presenting all the wonderful things that the group has been doing.

On the way to the hotel near the airport, I met a young mother (very sweet and smiling… my type of person 🙂 with her son, Kendal. They are traveling (backpacking) around Europe for 5 weeks. They had just returned from Greece and they were on the way to Rome (I didn’t ask why they were using Gatwick as a hop). They are from Portland!!! 🙂

Kendal and I became friends instantly. He even gave me a pin that he and his mom made as a present at the end. I really wish them all the best and I hope they keep in touch 🙂

Now… on to Greece… recharge, get rid the last bits of negative energy from the summer, and have fun! 🙂

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