Panel

Academia vs Industry

Career Paths

Are they really mutually exclusive?

Eirini Ntoutsi

Professor, FU Berlin, Germany

Eirini Ntoutsi is a professor of Artificial Intelligence at the Free University of Berlin (FUB), Germany, where she leads the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning group. Before joining FUB in March 2021, she was an associated professor of Intelligent Systems at the Leibniz University Hannover (LUH), Germany.

She holds a diploma in Computer Engineering and Informatics (2001) and a Master in Computer Engineering and Informatics (2003) from the Department of Computer Engineering and Informatics (CEID), University of Patras, Greece. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Piraeus, Greece, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Yannis Theodoridis. Before joining LUH in February 2016, she was a post-doctoral researcher at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich (LMU) in the group of Prof. Dr. Hans-Peter Kriegel, which she joined in 2010 with an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation fellowship for post-doctoral researchers. In 2009 she worked as a Data Mining Expert at OTE S.A.

Her research lies in the areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). The overarching goal is to design intelligent algorithms that learn from data continuously following the cumulative nature of human learning while ensuring that what has been learned is correct and delivers positive social impact following ethical and legal requirements. Currently, we focus on the following aspects: i) Continuous learning over non-stationary data and data streams, that is, adapting machine learning models to changing environments. ii)Responsible AI, particularly fairness-aware machine learning and explainable AI iii) Creative AI, that is, using machines to generate new synthetic data and solutions, for example, wind turbines.

Anna Kyriakidou

Software Director, inos Automationssoftaware Gmbh


Athanasios (Nassos) Katsamanis

VP of Engineering at Behavioral Signal Technologies, Principal Researcher at Athena Research Center

Dr. Athanasios (Nassos) Katsamanis is a Principal Researcher at ATHENA R.C. since 2019 conducting research on dialogue systems, multimodal human-computer interaction, and multimodal speech processing. He is also the Tech Lead of Behavioral Signal Technologies, Inc. where he works with a team of engineers on research and development of conversation analytics based on affective computing of spoken interactions. Nassos got his M.Eng (with highest honors) and PhD from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 2003 and 2009 respectively, and after that, he worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Viterbi School of Engineering at USC for almost three years. He has conducted extensive research on computational modeling and understanding of human behavior based on multimodal processing and analysis of speech, facial expressions, and body language.

After his postdoc at USC, and for the following 3 years, he was a Research Associate at NTUA, working on audiovisual saliency and audiovisual speech synthesis in the frame of the Greek research project Cognimuse. In parallel, he also worked as a Visiting Research Associate at the Robotic Perception and Interaction Unit of Athena RC in Greece, investigating smart-home speech technologies and human-robot interfaces for children and elderly people. From 2013 to 2015 he was the Principal Investigator of a research project funded by Onassis Foundation on the adaptation of these technologies for the assistance of paraplegic patients. He has published more than 60 papers (cited more than 2300 times, source: Google Scholar) in international peer-reviewed journals and conferences in the areas of multimodal speech processing, human behavior analysis, affective computing, speech production modeling, speech recognition, acoustic event detection, sign language recognition, and multimodal fusion. Nassos is also an entrepreneur, having co-founded beenotes, and as its CTO, he built the first speech-enabled apiculture data collection and analysis platform in 2016.

Neoklis Polyzotis

Senior Staff Engineer at Databricks


Vasilis Efthymiou

Postdoctoral Researcher at ICS-FORTH, Visiting Instructor at University of Crete

Vasilis Efthymiou is a postdoctoral researcher at Information Systems Laboratory of FORTH-ICS, leading a project on responsible entity resolution, and a visiting instructor at the Computer Science Department of University of Crete, teaching advanced database topics, knowledge representation and reasoning, as well as information systems. Before joining FORTH, he was a postdoctoral researcher at IBM Research in Almaden Research Center, CA, USA, working on data management and AI. He received his PhD from the Computer Science Department of University of Crete for research on entity resolution in the Web of Data. After his research internship at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, NY, USA, on matching Web tables to Knowledge Graphs, he has joined forces with researchers from IBM Research, Oxford University and City University of London to co-organize the SemTab challenges: an effort to benchmark systems dealing with the tabular data to KG matching problem, so as to facilitate their comparison on the same basis and the reproducibility of the results. He is a co-author of the book "Entity Resolution in the Web of Data".