Tech Talks Central

The close collaboration between the NCSR “Demokritos” and CERN is illustrated once more during our interview with Dr. Theodoros Geralis, Research Director at the Institute of Particle & Nuclear Physics of the historic institution in Athens, and also President of the 300-strong Hellenic Society for the Study of High-Energy Physics. Dr. Geralis gives us a first-hand account on their common activities, explaining the different kinds of NCSR participation in the famous CMS experiment which lead to the discovery of the Higgs particle, in 2012. He also describes the next steps towards a frame larger than the standard model, which will explain our world even better, solving perhaps the problem of dark matter. Finally, he points out the high level of the Greek researchers, demonstrated by the fact that they play a critical and quite disproportional to the size of their country, role at CERN. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central.

A senior researcher at the National Observatory of Athens, Dr. Demetra Founda focuses on the “hot” topics of climate change and global warming in the whole area of SE Europe and, most obviously, in Athens. She tells us about the importance of the more than 150 years old temperature records kept by NOA and alerts us about the significant change observed during the last decades. She warns us of the significant increase in air-temperature; approximately one degree Celsius per decade which amounts to at least three degrees, since the mid 70s! She characterizes this problem as very serious, asks for urgent measures from the State and warns that -based on models and assumptions- our region will certainly be much warmer and drier by the end of the century. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central.

Dr. Sophia Kremydi describes the history of her discipline, Numismatics, the study or collection of coins, paper currency, and medals. She tells us all about its origin and its evolution from the private to the public collections we admire today; and explains that the reason we collect ancient coins is not only, out of curiosity, but because they’re an important primary source of historical information that we can’t find from other sources. She also compares the ancient economies to the modern ones (simpler and more complex, at the same time) and tells us about her own research on ancient Macedonian coins; her two books to be published soon; as well as the creation of online databases on the subject, which will be shared and updated by researchers all over the world. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central.

Particle physicist and Research Director at NCSR “Demokritos”, Dr. George Fanourakis, talks about the scientific revolution that has improved our understanding of the Universe, during the last 15 years, as we try to decipher the mystery concerning dark matter and dark energy, and describes the important part the NCSR scientific team plays in the CAST experiment at CERN. He describes the special equipment they’ve developed to detect axions converted to x-rays, which are easier to study and talks about the new and upgraded detectors, like the MicroMegas. Finally, he gives a preview on the European Researchers’ Night 2015 program, where researchers and scientists from five research centers (at least in Attica) will show in a visitor-friendly way, what they are doing in their labs and how the results of their work apply to our daily life. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central.

Dr. Vangelis Karkaletsis, the seasoned Research Director at NCSR “Demokritos”, dives into the quite significant educational activities at the historic Greek Research Center. He focuses on the ever increasing synergies it holds with American and European universities in joint PhD programs, the classic annual summer school for Greek students that this year turns 50 (!), as well as the successful biannual international school for young researchers. He also talks about the strengthening of international research co-operation in NCSR; he reveals a lot about their ambitious plans for the future and, sure enough, he doesn’t forget to speak about the main cause for this round of interviews, the European Researchers’ Night, that will take place in late September 2015. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central.

Dr. Kontoyiannis is a physicist of the sea, a sea-going researcher who extracts valuable results based on the wealth of data obtained during his expeditions with the Hellenic Center of Marine Research. The main area of his vast experience has to do with sea currents, starting from the open seas (i.e. the Gulf Stream, which was the topic of his thesis) and reaching to a coastal ocean, like the Mediterranean, and more specifically the Aegean Sea. He talks about an interesting recent project he’s involved in - the measurements of Evoikos currents near his native Chalkis and the effort to examine its energy harvesting potential - and continues with the qualities (the “flame”, as he puts it) that young and aspiring students need to have, in order to become researchers and succeed in this demanding discipline. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central.

Dr. Ioannis Costas holds a doctoral degree in Chemistry and specialises in Catalysis and Organic Synthesis. His research, a palladium complex for the Suzuki reaction, is commercially available. He explains how Catalysis is a widely used process in chemistry & engineering with over 80% of all industrial processes involving it. Used in energy, food, industrial products, pharmaceuticals and many more fields, life as we know it, would be impossible without catalysis. Dr. Costas talks about his fields of practice including green chemistry and transition metal homogenous catalysis. Unfortunately, time was limited and the interviewer could not go deeper into the science but had to wrap it up with a question on how he would motivate young students to follow Chemistry. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central

Dr. Spyros Raptis has a degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering and a doctoral degree in computational intelligence. He talks about his main field of research and expertise which is speech and signal processing, and explains why sentiment analysis is significant, when it comes to building better interaction and communication processes in machines. To strengthen his point he presents the new HUBIC Lab: a state-of-the-art lab for studying human behaviour, interaction and communication by capturing different modalities such as speech, motion, body stance, facial expression, gaze… in different settings and contexts. This will help in capturing, analyzing, studying, modeling but also generating embodied behaviours aiming at more affective, life-like and socially aware virtual characters and robots. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech talks Central.

Demetris and his team (Dimitrios Dessylas, Rox Kulliye and Spyridon Michelakis) chose to combine tourism with philanthropy in their proposition for BattleHack. Their idea is that visitors may use the PayPal platform to donate an amount of money in exchange for hearing and viewing a story about historical monuments of world heritage in Athens. Receivers of the donations will notify the donor about the progress of their cause via social media and SMS. Demetris, a PhD researcher from Ioannina University, talked a lot about his important startup experience abroad and also Rox came in to praise the high level of the Greek human capital in the field. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central.

Pawel Sawicz is the API Developer and Developer Evangelist at JustGiving, a global social platform for giving, consisting of more than 24 million users. He talks about their participation in the Athens Battlehack 2015, which does have as main theme the creation of an app for social good. Since he was born and raised in Poland, is now working in the UK and travelling a lot, he lists the similarities and differences of the startup ecosystems. We also talk about social entrepreneurship and how companies can make an impact in our lives and our society. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sawiczpawel and read his blog on .NET technical issues at http://pawel.sawicz.eu/. Interviewed by Sakis Triantafyllakis for Tech Talks Central.

Robin Johnson shares with us some interesting facts about Sendgrid, their amazing services and APIs and why they’re taking part at the Athens Battlehack 2015. He talks about the hackathons he’s taken part in and what his role, as a Developer Evangelist, encloses. We ask him about the core skills a developer should possess and he reveals some nice insights from his own experience. Last but not least we talk about which programming languages and frameworks are now hot or will be in the next years. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/rbin. Interviewed by Sakis Triantafyllakis for Tech Talks Central.

Hamilton Chapman talks about Pusher, what services it offers through its APIs and why they’re taking part at the Athens Battlehack 2015. We ask him about real time web technologies, where we find them and what we can hope to see in the future. Will it be only notifications, chat and dashboards, as we’ve seen most apps use it up to now, or can we expect to see more interesting instances appearing in IoT, health and other fields that will start to really impact our lives. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/hamchapman. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Manolis Nikiforakis and his team (Dimitris Karagiannis and Thanasis Daglis) set out to create a multiplayer reactive game, using mostly Arduinos and Particle (Spark) Cores, where the losers’ money would automatically be donated to charity! Well, that was the main idea, but -unfortunately- time was not enough for them to fully implement it during the 24-hour duration of BattleHack. Nevertheless, Manolis (a seasoned researcher and developer with 12+ years of experience), confessed to us that he loves taking part in hackathons… just for the fun of it. And, surely enough, we also talked a lot about the opportunities arising all the time, as technology evolves, for example in the relatively new field of IoT. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central.

As the title suggests it’s all about taking care of the Developer Community, PayPal and Braintree have created, and Alberto Lopez Martin sure has the way to get everyone motivated. A very lively Spaniard, he himself is an experienced developer and understands the pains and gains. He talks about BattleHack, as a member of the team for the past year; what it strives to accomplish and which are the best apps he has seen being created up to now. He looks forward to joining the next BattleHack in Tokyo and honestly who wouldn’t be… Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/albertuslm. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Fotos Georgiadis and his team (Dimitris Zorbas, Giannis Hatziioannidis, Javie Gonel) tried to find a viable solution, during BattleHack 2015 in Athens, to a very big problem, nowadays in Europe, mainly in Greece and Spain, but in other countries as well: the soaring unemployment amongst young people. Yet, many of them play and excel in trivia games. What if there was a mobile app that could match their skills and interests to prospective employees and vacant positions? Their idea proved to be bright enough to secure the 2nd place in the competition for them! Not bad. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/gfotos. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central.

John Lunn, the main evangelist for the BattleHack series of events, has become a sort of legend. The great marketing efforts of Braintree_dev has contributed to this but also, his years of expertise in development and the genuine admiration of the developers that attend the event in every city. During the Athens event, held in May of 2015, John told us what BattleHack aims to achieve; whether PayPal is looking to hire developers through the event and whether it has been successful all these years. Of course we did ask him about PayPal spinning off eBay and what they’re planning with their public offering. He talks about mobile payments and developers disrupting the Banking system with all these new fintech startups. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech talks Central.

Dr. Aristotelis Chatziioannou, Electrical & Computer Engineer, Dr. Lefteris Pilalis, Biochemist and Dr. Ioannis Valavanis, Computer Engineer, all with a degree in Bioinformatics present http://e-nios.com, a spin-off they created from the National Hellenic Research Foundation. They talk about the solutions e-nios offers for analysing and interpreting data derived from modern high throughput Genomics technologies and the opportunities that open up for them in the future. They mention what it means to be a researcher and a startup founder; what kind of support they have received through mentoring and funding; whether they would prefer to be in some other country outside Greece and how they see their startup growing. They touch on the subject of data ethics and the future of medicine and patient care due to supporting technologies like theirs. Follow them on http://twitter.com/e_nios or sign up on their newsletter http://eepurl.com/bn1c8j. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Shock, happiness, ecstasy, pure adrenaline and tiredness – those were the feelings moments after the announcement of the coveted victory… Shai Mishali, the global winner of BattleHack Competition Finals (https://2014.battlehack.org) in November 2014 (along with Pavel Kaminsky, as representatives of vibrant start-up city Tel Aviv, where they had won in the local competition), remembers the hot atmosphere, the VIP treatment and the unique experience of holding the Axe of Victory at San Jose, CA. He insists that he will take part again in the competition and urges every serious developer to join. Find him on Twitter under twitter.com/freak4pc. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central.

One of the greatest problems that network operators face in a daily basis, is how to keep their customers satisfied, in order to minimize churn. So, any serious proposal and solution on how to succeed in this endless battle, via controlling, configuring and testing a network, deserves attention. Paul Carter, president and CEO of Global Wireless Solutions, a data collection company specializing on information and competitive benchmarking, describes what it takes for the networks to ensure that their customers can use their mobile phones wherever they live, regardless of the device used, and also insists that “the third Internet wave is a big change for all of us”. Interviewed by Sakis Triantafyllakis for Tech Talks Central.

Raphael Labaca Castro, Security Research at ESET & Chief Editor at WeLiveSecurity.com talked about some well known security threats, malware that could harm your devices, no matter your operating system, platform or technologies. Back in 2004 there was only malware that used bluetooth protocol; this has changed into new threats that encrypt the information of the android user to ask for ransom, to give back access to the data. Of course he mentions how a lot of people don’t really care about their data as they “don’t have nothing to hide or be afraid of” but they are all exposed to threats. Interviewed by Sakis Triantafyllakis for Tech Talks Central.