Personal

Squaw Valley skiing weekend

The last weekend of January I traveled to California to meet with Jim and Emil for a weekend of skiing at Squaw Valley. We were treated with an excellent weather on Saturday and amazing new 20-30cm snow on Sunday. Soooooo much fun!

I hadn’t seen my pal Jim for a long time so I really wanted to catch up. Even though I had exchanged messages and talked on Skype with Emil, I was looking forward to meeting him in person. He’s a lot of fun! 🙂

The weekend consisted of a lot of geek talk, especially around graphs, coffee breaks in the slopes, and skiing. Emil, Jim, and the rest of the gang over at NeoTechnology are doing some really really cool stuff. I am soooo tempted 😉

Earlier today I decided to create a short movie from the videos and photos 🙂

Enjoy…

Please note that the video might be blocked in some countries (e.g. Germany) because of the soundtrack. According to YouTube’s copyright notice, even though I own the music, I can’t use it on home videos that I publish online. Oh well.

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

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