Tech Talks Central

We interviewed Pedro Concalves, COO for Hi Jiffy. He explains how the hotel chatbot works over Facebook messenger, communicating with potential customers, directly. Their strongest advantage is the sort of customer service they provide with a human touch. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Vicki interviewed Anthony Rovito from All The Foodies. "All the Foodies" is a creative cooking network show with a hipster twist. Random chefs or wanna-be-chefs prepare the recipe in a very aesthetic video, explaining in 2 minutes the story behind the recipe. You can look up their videos on Facebook at AllTheFoodiesSpain. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Gesture and face recognition including emotions is the next big thing in the future of driving and safety when it comes to the automotive industry. Rony Greenberg, Vice President of Development at EyeSight talked with Vicki about how poker gave him the idea to work on face recognition. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

How about a smart palette? You might think of it as trivial, but GSMA surely thinks different, as it has awarded RM2 with the innovation award for its Smart Palette. Vicki interviewed Christopher Gibbs at the Innovation City and discussed about their geolocation enabled long lasting palettes with amazing opportunities for the assets business. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Vicki was in the Innovation City speaking with Intel and AT&T on IoT and sensor kits, that cut back time and cost for ventures who are looking for ways to get into the Internet of Things era and wanna start small. Dipti Vachani, Vice President General Manager of strategy and solutions IoT Group at Intel, and Sunder Somasundaram, Director of IoT solutions at AT&T discuss Intel’s LIQD program and their IoT development partnership. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Ever wanted to get started with sensors and create your own Internet of Things? AT&T has a starter kit solution for developers with limited development knowledge. Vicki discussed with Richard Finn, Lead Product Marketing Manager at AT&T, on the IoT starter kits available. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Bas Van Abel, Founder and CEO of Fairphone talks to Vicki about the concept behind the mobile phone Fairphone. It all started from the awful mining conditions in Congo. It’s not often we talk about fair construction. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Gregor Gimmy founder and head of the BMW Startup Garage talks to Tech Talks Central and Vicki about the term he’s coined "Venture Client", where a big corporation avoids the usual accelerator model and goes straight to being the client of the startup, supporting and growing it in the process. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Daniel Cohen, Product Director at Fluid Ads, a UK startup, discusses with Vicki about their easy to use HTML5 ad creation platform. Daniel says it takes a few minutes to create a proper HTML5 ad on their platform -with limited technical knowledge- instead of the usual 4 to 5 days. Check it out! Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Vicki talks with Maya Thomine Desmazures, from La French Tech and finds out what France is doing for its ecosystem of startups. Ever wondered how you can move your startup to Paris? There’s a VISA for that now. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Yiannis Rizopoulos speaks with Suresh Subramanian VP of Global industry relations of Iconectiv, an Ericsson subsidiary on the standards of the MZM and Internet of Things era, security and authentication. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central.

Anastasia Krithara, research associate at the Insititute of Informatics and Telecommunications (IIT) of NCSR "Demokritos" talks about IASiS, an EU funded project that seeks to pave the way for precision medicine approaches by utilising insights from patient data. It aims to combine information from medical records, imaging databases and genomics data to enable more personalised diagnosis and treatment approaches in two disease areas – lung cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Speech to text and vice-versa is a technology that is driving a lot of AI innovation. One of which is virtual interactive assistants like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant. Aimilios Chalamandaris, CEO and Co-founder of Innoetics shares with us their 10-years journey, starting an NLP (Natural Language Processing) spin-off out of Athena Research and Innovation Centre up to the point of getting acquired by Samsung Electronics. He shares with us the main factors that made the acquisition possible and what are the next steps for Innoetics. If you are a researcher and trying to productise and commercialize your project or idea then this is an interview you should listen to, as Aimilios shares his insights on what skills you need to develop to become a businessman and an entrepreneur. Interviewed by Sakis Triantafyllakis for Tech Talks Central.

Modern powerful computers open a whole new era for the application of the Monte Carlo method for the simulation of physical systems of higher complexity. The Monte Carlo simulations are important computational techniques in many areas of natural sciences and have significant application in particle and nuclear physics, quantum physics, statistical physics, quantum chemistry, material science, among many other multidisciplinary applications. In the heart of the Monte Carlo simulations are Pseudo Random Number Generators (RNG). The primary objective of the proposed network is a systematic development and implementation of the state of the art new generation of Pseudo Random Number Generators based on Kolmogorov-Anosov K-systems, which demonstrate excellent statistical properties, into a multidisciplinary usable product. Senior researcher George Savvidy explains how this rather theoretical problem also finds many applications in everyday life. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central.

Nassos Katsamanis, researcher at the ILSP Lap for the Athena Research Centre, and VP of Engineering for the Behavioral Signals startup, discusses the origins of the team and their research. He explains how the US based startup is using speech data, AI and deep learniing for behavioral modeling, in real time, and how their findings can be used by companies who produce large quantities of speech data. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Combustion processes (SCS) are advantageous for the production of nanomaterials, as an express and simple technology; using this method, which allows the creation of a unique morphology and metastable phase composition, particles of high purity can be obtained. Senior researcher at NCSR “Demokritos”, Professor Galina Xanthopoulou, talks about the application of this technology for tuning crystal lattice structure, nanoparticle size; explaining how this could be an efficient breakthrough for the production of nanomaterials with ordered properties. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central.

What is going on in diabetic research? Can we revitalize pancreatic stem cells to prevent kidney failure and help diabetes patients? Dr. Garyfallia Drossopoulou offers valuable information on these very important issues for numerous people all over the world, based on her team research, which is supported by Novo Nordisk, a pharmaceutical company leading in diabetic treatment. She talks about the social impact of their results, the significant improvement of the current therapeutic treatment and their effort for a better quality of life for all these people. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central.

Given the fact that millennials and Generation Z visitors rarely get attracted by the content of museums, even open-air ones, the need to find a kind of “bait” for them in order to visit, is more than an urgent one. Maria Roussou, Assistant Professor in Interactive Systems at UoA and senior researcher at “Athena” Research Center, explains how she tries to offer new and immersive experiences to them, clad in a digital storytelling costume, in the framework of an EU - funded (Horizon 2020) project that exploits the special dynamics of Human - Computer Interaction. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central.

Renée Jiménez, Head Marketing Communications, Manager GSMA talks to us about Hack_D_Gap, the global startup challenge, ahead of Mobile World Congress 2017. Renée sets the context by explaining what the GSMA’s plans for women4tech are, who initiated it, the initiatives planned during the MWC17 and the expected impact of the overall program. While the program, its activities, and the challenge is not exclusive to women she does explain why its creation was imperative in the overall scheme of things at GSMA; focusing on how they want to address gender equality and diversity in the technology sector.

Costas Spyropoulos, Director of Research at the Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications at NCSR “Demokritos” describes the many benefits of the IoT era, when we will have -in only a few years from now- several billions of connected devices all around us, offering terabytes of data and many, many new simple and complex services as an answer to our needs. Dr. Spyropoulos gives some examples of these services in tourism, health, culture, retail and other sectors but he also points out the existing problems in interoperability, privacy and security. He also talks about their research, at NCSR; their own IoT platform and services that use open standards in order to easily extend and foster broad use. Finally, he insists that the public has to be educated on IoT and for that reason, himself and his team participate in conferences to inform the audience and demonstrate best practices. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central.