Minos Garofalakis is a Professor at the School of ECE at the Technical University of Crete (TUC) where he directs the Software Technology and Network Applications (SoftNet) Lab. He also works as a (part-time) senior research consultant for Huawei's Institute for Strategic Research (ISR) and Boole Research Center (BRC) at Edinburgh, UK, and is the Co-founder and Director of Research at Agora Labs, a startup company bringing state-of-the-art data privacy technologies to the healthcare domain. Minos recently completed an 8.5-year term as Director of the Information Management Systems Institute (IMSI) at the ATHENA Research Center, where he remains as collaborating faculty member. Minos received the MSc and PhD degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and previously held senior/principal researcher positions at Bell Labs (1998-2005), Intel Research Berkeley (2005-2007), and Yahoo! Research (2007-2008); in parallel, he held an Adjunct Professor position at the EECS Department of UC Berkeley (2006-2008). Between 2/2022-2/2023, he also worked as a consulting Senior Principal Scientist for Amazon Web Services (AWS). Minos’s research interests lie in the broad area of Big Data Analytics. He has published over 170 papers that have received more than 17,000 citations (h-index=71) according to Google Scholar. Minos is an ACM and IEEE Fellow (for contributions to data analytics), a Member of Academia Europaea, and a recipient of several awards, including the TUC “Excellence in Research” Award (2015), the Bell Labs President’s Gold Award (2004), three Best Research Paper Awards (VLDB’2024, ICDE’2009, ADBIS'2025), and ten "best of" conference paper selections.