About me
I was born in Athens, Greece. I received the ECE Dipl. from the National Tech. Univ. of Athens in 1990. I then spend 12 years in the east coast studying and doing research. I received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University, in 1991 and 1995, respectively. My thesis work focused on analyzing and modeling non-linear interaction between source and vocal tract during speech production. The work relied heavily on the AM-FM speech model proposed by my advisor Petros Maragos with colleagues Jim Kaiser and Tom Quatieri.
I then went on to work for Bell Labs, and AT&T Shannon Labs. My research work there focused on robust speech recognition in collaboration with my mentor Rick Rose, on children speech analysis, recognition and interaction with my long-time collaborator and friend Shri Narayanan, and on spoken dialogue interaction with the DARPA Communicator team at Bell Labs most notably Eric Fosler-Lussier, Jeff Kuo and Egbert Ammicht. While at Bell Labs I embarked on a part-time M.B.A. at Stern School of Business, NYU.among world-class colleagues including Vas Digalakis. My work there focused on robust speech recognition, multimedia processing, child-computer interaction, spoken dialogue systems and more recently lexical semantics. In 2013, I went back to my old stomping grounds at NTUA, now as an academic, working with work-class colleagues and students on child-robot interaction, emotion recognition, language development and deep learning.
In 2016, together with Shri Narayanan and Prem Natarajan, we founded Behavioral Signals an emotion AI deep tech startup, where I served both as a CEO and CTO. In 2021, I joined Alexa as an Amazon scholar working on natural multiparty dialogue joining forces with excellent colleagues and good friends.
Where I Work
- In August 2021, I joined Alexa as an Amazon scholar collaborating with the Natural Language Understanding / Dialog group.
- In the summer of 2013, I joined the School of Electronical and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece as an associate professor.
- I have been involved in various deep-tech startups, and have co-founded Alesman in 2009, Behavioral Informatix in 2013 and Behavioral Signals in 2016.
- Since 2016 I have been a visiting professor at the Viterbi School of Engineering, Univ. of Southern California collaborating with the SAIL lab.
- I am also affiliated with the Athena Research and Innovation Center in Athens and the Telecommunication System Institute in Chania, Crete.
- For the 2013-14 academic year I was a visiting Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering of University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA affiliated with the SAIL Lab and ISI.
- From 2003 to 2013 I was an Associate Professor at the School of Electronic and Computer Engineering of Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece.
- From 1999 to 2002 I was a Technical Staff Member and Technical Supervisor at the Multimedia Communications Lab at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, NJ.
- From 1999 to 2001 I was an adjunct Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering of Columbia University, New York, NY.
- From 1995 to 1999 I was a Senior Technical Staff Member at the Speech and Image Processing Lab, AT&T Shannon Labs, Florham Park, NJ.
You can find my full CV here
What I do
My current research interests include speech processing, analysis, synthesis and recognition, dialog and multi-modal systems, lexical semantics, natural language understanding, large language models, general artificial intelligence, behavioral informatics, affective analysis, modeling and recognition, machine learning and representation learning, cognitive semantics, nonlinear signal processing, and multimodal child-computer interaction. I am especially interested on how cognitive semantic representations can motivate us to create computational models that are robust, accurate and rapid learners of multimodal information with application to deep learning.
I have authored or co-authored over 210 papers in professional journals and conferences (citations: 8954, h-index: 50, i10-index: 134, source google scholar - Apr 2024). I was a co-author of the paper "Creating conversational interfaces for children" that received a 2005 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award, and the co-editor of the book "Multimodal Processing and Interaction: Audio, Video, Text" , Springer, 2008. A list of my patents can be found here. I have been a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society since 1992, an IEEE fellow since 2016 and an ISCA fellow since 2023. I have served three terms at the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee and one term at the IEEE Multimedia Signal Processing Committee.