After graduating, I went on to serve in the Greek Army, a task mandatory for every Greek male citizen. The service duration is 12 months now, but it used to be 18 months back then (lucky me!). I served on the Division of Research & Information Systems. Here is a photo of a bunch of us computer soldiers. I am the grinning guy at the far back right end. The army was a very valuable experience for me; I learnt to deal with people who do not always base their decisions on logic :-). While in the army, I learnt Java and ASP, and took the GRE exam, so I guess it wasn't a complete waste of time. I also perfected the ancient Greek art of frappe drinking.
Immediately after being released from the army, I came to the United States to continue with my studies. I attended the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta, GA, where I earned an M.S. in Computer Science in May 2003. While at Georgia Tech, I met many people from all over the world. Here is the core of what we liked to call "the CS gang". During my Masters, I focused on User Interfaces and Programming Languages, working in the Augmented Environments Lab. Along with my two advisors, Blair MacIntyre and Yannis Smaragdakis, I worked on exploring the potential of automatic application partitioning for prototyping pervasive computing applications. The results of this work were published in the July-August 2004 issue of the IEEE Pervasive Computing magazine. You can download the article here.
At this point in time, I realized that I wanted to move to warmer climates, so after briefly considering the University of Hawaii at Manoa, I settled for UCLA in Los Angeles, California. I drove all the way from Atlanta to Los Angeles in my invincible Mazda MX3, seeing many interesting places on the way. Here I am, having claimed the Grand Canyon for Greece! I recently earned my Ph.D. at UCLA's Computer Science department. My advisor was Eddie Kohler, and I was a proud member of the Readable Software Systems Group, located in the TERTL lab. For more information on my research, please see the Research section of this site.
I was very happy with our department at UCLA. I enjoyed the interaction with our young faculty members and my fellow graduate students. I even got to be a Teaching Assistant for a couple of classes. We annually hold a faculty vs. students basketball game, which is usually very competitive. Check out the teams for the 2003 and the 2005 games, and the photos from the 2007 game. Being a member of the TERTL lab is also a lot of fun. I got to hang out with smart people, and we often had stimulating (and geeky) conversations. Here is our lab song. Our activities included surprise birthday parties, getting together for a game of bowling, eating to death at Fogo de Chao, competitive games of CandyLand, and playing beach volleyball in Santa Monica. If you are also a CandyLand fun, this video might be of interest (here are the slides). Most of my time was consumed by research, playing with extensions for Mozilla Firefox, and trying to solve the Rubik's cube. This guy seems to have learned how to do that pretty well already.
During the summers of 2004 and 2005 I was an instructor for Johns Hopkins' CTY program for gifted high school kids. I taught "Introduction to Programming" in C. Working with kids is very invigorating; they have so much energy! Here is a photo of my class in the summer of 2005 in Hawaii. For more information on my teaching activities, please see the Teaching section. In the summer of 2006 I interned with the Networking Research Group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, working on a novel peer-to-peer systems project. I will have more to say about that soon in the Research section.
On the more personal side, I proposed to the love of my life in April 2006. I am so happy, I can't even begin to describe how I feel about her :D