Background

2013-present
Co-founded TecVis LP, focusing on building context-aware solutions that utilise the software as well as the knowledge gathered over the years. The software created by TecVis forms the basis for building scenario-specific solutions. TecVis has three apps in the Google Play market: AIRS, a customizable platform for recording and monitoring lifestyle-related information; Storica, a customizable platform that uses data recorded through AIRS for providing processed information and various visualisations for lifestyle-related applications; AIRS Ruler, a customizable rule engine that can act upon data recorded in AIRS for controlling device functions.

Main roles:

Designed Storica, the Android-based mobile apps for capturing, processing and visualizing lifestyle information. Storica is largely based on the work performed during my PhD (which included system design, implementation and user studies);
Played a lead role within various research proposals submitted for EPSRC and EU funding that largely focused on continuations of the PhD work and extensions to the AIRS and Storica apps. The proposals involved collaborations with various institutions, such as University of Cambridge (UK), Lancaster University (UK), InterDigital Europe Ltd. (UK), University of Warwick (UK), 21c Consultancy (UK), Create Net (Italy), Athens University of Economics and Business (Greece);
Big Data SIG champion in Cambridge Wireless, an extensive network of various UK and international companies working in areas related to data gathering, processing and communication. My role is to help defining the content and structure of the events organized by CW within the Big Data SIG.

2013
As part of the CPEI group at Cambridge Judge Business School, I worked on extending MyRoR, the system I built during my PhD, towards capturing various aspects of email usage that can be used within stress-management studies. Within this work I focused on developing models and platform extensions for capturing stressors, stress symptoms as well as solutions for supporting organizations in detecting as well as addressing such issues.

2008-2013
* Member of the Intelligent Environments group within the School of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at University of Essex, Colchester, UK. One of the main contributors to creating the research proposal for the PAL project (total funding ~£2 millions), funded by TSB and EPSRC as part of the TSB’ ALIP activities.The consortium was comprised by academia (University of Essex and University of Cambridge) and industry (BT, Ericsson, Thales, HW Communications, MAC Ltd.). ThePAL project looked at implications of various future healthcare scenarios (both preventive and assistive) on networking, communication and application designs. Within the project, I led the development of the project’s guiding usage scenarios, and contributed to the system architecture and requirements work. My main research focus was on designing and developing a lifestyle management system aimed towards collecting, interpreting and presenting information to an end user within a self-reflective and interactive environment. The system I developed includes various design choices such as: integrating end users in the process of gathering and interpreting data, providing them with both abstract and detailed access to information, creating a story-inspired model and visualisation paradigm for representing and correlating collected data, allowing end users various levels of system customisation and data interpretation, and giving them full control over collected data (i.e., by not automatically uploading everything to an external cloud server). The work on designing and building the MyRoR system also included performing various user studies (via an online questionnaire as well as based on exploratory in-situ system evaluations) that focused on creating more understanding with regard to building lifestyle management solutions, especially focusing on how to use storytelling-inspired concepts in order to process and visualize information both for personal as well as shared consumption. During 2008, I participated to the FP7 EU-funded project, ATRACO, focusing on developing usage scenarios as well as gathering technical and user requirements.

* From 2010-2013, visiting researcher at the Computer Lab, Cambridge University, associated to the Opera group, lead by Prof. Jean Bacon.

* Member of the CSaP Policy Fellows Network, with the role of meeting with CSaP Policy Fellows and finding ways of incorporating own work and ideas into their future work.

2005-2007

Principal level researcher and research group manager, Nokia Research Center, Helsinki, Finland.
Research topics: creating context-aware life logging systems including sensing platforms, data processing and visualisations; designing showcase prototypes.
Research group manager: leading a group of 10 people. The group’s research was focused on context mining and management, Semantic Web and context-aware systems.
Also: internal research “selling” tasks (e.g., internal workshops, meeting business and R&D people, creating and contributing to visions and strategies for NRC and Nokia), creating and leading research projects; creating and managing various university collaborations with MIT Media Lab(Prof. Roz Picard, Prof. Mitchel Resnick, and Leo Burd), Georgia Tech (Prof. Gregory Abowd and his group), Columbia University (Knarig Arabshnian and Prof. Henning Schulzrinne and ), CMU (Prof. Anind Dey), Tampere University (Prof. Kaisa Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila and her group) and Helsinki University of Technology (Prof. Heikki Saikkonen). Created and lead SharMe, a TEKES-funded collaboration (funding level 700K Euros) between Nokia Research, Tampere University (Prof. Kaisa Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila) and Helsinki University of Technology (TKK)(Prof. Heikki Saikkonen) focused on issues around life-logging (http://www.cs.tut.fi/ihte/projects/sharme/). Participated to the FP6 EU-funded project MobiLife, contributing to Nokia work in designing user scenarios and demonstrators for context-aware systems.

1999-2005

Senior Research Engineer, Agent Technology Group, Nokia Research Center, Boston, MA, USA.
Research topics: created, managed and contributed to projects in the areas of affective computing, context provisioning and modeling, M2M and mobile-based sensing, RFID, Semantic Web, constraint programming and ad-hoc communities. Other roles: created multiple contacts with relevant business people in Nokia through various discussions, presentations and workshops; contributed to strategy and vision work in NRC and Nokia in areas related to context, location awareness, robotics, and metadata; established multiple external contacts and transferred ideas gathered from universities inside Nokia; participated to the FP6 EU-funded project MIMOSA, focusing on designing the overall MIMOSA device architecture, defining the pub-sub remote sensing middleware specification and developing the mobile (and M2M) sensing platform NORS; provided consultancy services to the Nokia Ventures Organization; built extensive IPR portfolio in the area of context awareness (see list below). Created concept videos to highlight the power of context-awareness, personalization and software agents. Won the 2001 Achievement Award of NRC Software Technology Lab (only 2 in NRC SWA per year).

1997-1999

Software developer, Space Science Center, UNH.
Worked as part of the Equator-S project (coordinated by Prof. Lynn Kistler) in implementing software for mining and performing error correction on data gathered from the Equator-S satellite (C, C++ programming).

1998

Summer intern, Lucent Technologies, Warren, NJ, USA.
Worked in the Configurators Group (coord. Dr. Faiq Fazal) performing research in configuration problems, knowledge classification and product configurators. Studied the process of building a configurator for optical network applications using Trilogy modeling language.

1996-1999

Teaching Assistant/Research Assistant, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, USA.
Teaching responsibilities: “Introduction to Scientific Programming”, the basics of C programming.
Research responsibilities (worked as a Research Assistant in Prof. Eugene Freuder’s group, funded by Lucent Technologies). Performed research in the area of product configuration with a special emphasis on how to shorten the time of building a configurator and dealing with the long-time management of the configuration knowledge. Implemented a Java-based CSP (Constraint Satisfaction Problem, an AI paradigm)-based mechanism that automated changes made to a configuration model during and after the modeling phase.