I then went on to serve in the Greek Army, a mandatory service 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. The army was a very valuable experience for me; I learnt to deal with people who do not always base their actions and decisions on logic :p. 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 in 2001, 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 2003. 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 eventually 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 just claimed the Grand Canyon for Greece! I spent five wonderful years there, at the Computer Science department, learning and conducting research. My advisor was Eddie Kohler, and I was a proud member of the Readable Software Systems Group, located in the TERTL lab (with its unique name and corresponding logo, as well as lab song). For more information on my research, please see the Research section of this site.
I was very happy with my experience at UCLA. I enjoyed the interaction with our young faculty members and my fellow graduate students. I even had the opportunity of being 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 TERTL, I got to hang out with smart people, and we often had stimulating (and geeky) conversations. Other 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 the rest of my time was consumed by research, and playing with extensions for Mozilla Firefox.
During the summers of 2004 and 2005 I was an instructor for the Johns HopkinsCTY 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 project aiming to improve the diagnosis accuracy of Web browsing failures. You can read all about it here. I finally defended my Ph.D. thesis and graduated in June 2008, and moved to New York to work for World Evolved, a Web startup in stealth mode. This didn't work out as well as I had hoped, so I recently transitioned to the algorithmic trading team at the Knight Capital Group. I look forward to learning more about the financial industry; should be fun.
In the meantime, on the more personal side, I proposed to the love of my life in April 2006, and got married in November 2008 (with my good friend Milan being the best man). I am so happy, I can't even begin to describe how I feel about her :D