Categories: Politics

It’s a celebration of democracy

Earlier tonight I dropped off my ballot. Every time I participate in a voting process, I feel that I celebrate the memory of the ancient Greeks who coined the idea that people can have a say in the running of their country’s affairs. I celebrate the memory of all of those who fought, even sacrificed their lives, so that we, the people, have the right to control our country’s destiny.

I have participated in many elections, mostly in Greece. This was the first time I voted as a US citizen. I find it disheartening that the level of participation in this celebration of our democratic rights is so low in this country.

Go people… vote!

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