About me

I am originally from the beautiful city of Chania on the island of Crete, Greece. (I guess that explains my first name.) I received my BSc (Valedictorian, School of Engineering) in 1992 from the University of Patras, Computer Engineering and Informatics Dept. (UOPCEID). I also spent the following year at UOPCEID as a post-graduate fellow. In the Fall of 1993, I joined the graduate program in Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, where I received my MSc (1994) and PhD (1998). I have worked as a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs (1998-2005), as a Senior Research Scientist at Intel Research Berkeley (2005-2007), and as a Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research (2007-2008). During 2006-2008, I also held an Adjunct Associate Professor position at the EECS Department of the University of California, Berkeley, where I was part of the UC-Berkeley Database Group. In September 2008, I moved to the Technical University of Crete. I served as the TUC ECE Department Chair for the period 9/2011-9/2013. Between 11/2012-3/2015, I was a Member of the Board of Directors of Information Society, S.A., a Greek government organization for advancing large-scale, national-level efforts in Information and Communication Technologies. Between 2/2022-2/2023, I also worked as a Consulting Senior Principal Scientist for Amazon Web Services (AWS).

I am an ACM Fellow (2018) "for contributions to data processing and analytics, particularly data streaming, approximation and uncertainty", an IEEE Fellow (2017) "for contributions to data streaming analytics", a Member of Academia Europaea (2023), and a recipient of the 2015 TUC Excellence in Research Award, the Bell Labs President's Gold Award (2004), the Bell Labs Teamwork Award (2003), two Conference Best Research Paper Awards ( VLDB'2024 , IEEE ICDE'2009 ), and ten "best of" conference paper selections. Google Scholar gives over 16,500 citations to my work, and an h-index value of 70.

For more details, please see a brief third person bio, or a more detailed curriculum vitae (pdf).

Some current/recent professional service:   IEEE ICDE'2025 (Industry and Applications Co-Chair), ACM SIGMOD'2025 (Associate Editor), IEEE ICDE'2024 (Lightning Talks Chair), IEEE ICDM'2024 (Area Chair), 4th ACM Europe Summer School on Data Science (Co-Chair), IEEE DSAA'2023 (PC Chair, Applications Track), IEEE ICDM'2023 (Area Chair), 2023 IEEE CS Fellows Evaluation Committee

Recent news:   OmniSketch receives Best Research Paper Award at VLDB'2024, Keynote talk at MEDES'2024, Keynote talk at IEEE BigData'2023, Research.com CS rankings for Greece, Keynote talk at ICPM'2022

Other points of web presence:  Wikipedia (Greek only),  LinkedIn,  Facebook.