Research

In the following you can find an overview of my current and previous research interests, as well as a list of research projects that I have participated in.

My research interests over the course of my PhD at the University of Surrey, during my professional career at Thales Research & Technology (UK) and lately as part of my postdoctoral activities at the University of Fribourg, Department of Informatics, Pervasive and Artificial Intelligence research group, have spanned across many areas; they nevertheless have followed a track that relates to one core issue, that of pervasive environments and their enabling factors.

Mobile ad hoc networks, wireless sensor networks, service oriented architectures, self-management, autonomic computing and context awareness have been amongst the research topics that I have studied and worked with over the course of the last years. All these seemingly diverse technologies and notions can be seen as the integral components of an overall framework to enable Mark Weiser’s innovative conceptualization of future computing that is “indistinguishable from everyday life”. This paradigm refers to truly pervasive environments that exploit ubiquitous communication were computing and human activities can be seamlessly and unobtrusively intertwined, with the sole purpose of enhancing everyday activities.

Pervasive environments have attracted and have been the focal point of interest and attention of a great number of researchers and relevant projects worldwide for a number of years. My research over the years entailed the fundamental requirements behind enabling such environments in terms of three core aspects, namely communications, context awareness and automated decision-making. Particular practical examples of pervasive environments that were detailed in my academic publications include that of self-management of mobile ad hoc networks and that of the use of wireless sensor networks for facilities and buildings management.

Areas of interest that inherently attract my attention include the following: network architectures, autonomic management and autonomic computing principles, policy based management, ubiquitous service provisioning, distributed systems, adaptive and reconfigurable information systems, mobile and wireless computing, context awareness, pervasive communications and computing and related aspects of the latter.

I have acted as a reviewer for the IEEE Transactions in Network and Service Management, Wiley Security and Communication Networks journal, IEEE Policy Workshop, ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems, ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference and ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp).

I have been actively involved in the following research projects:

• BioMPE - Bio-Inspired Monitoring of Pervasive Environments, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation . (proposal author)
• EMANICS - European Network of Excellence for the Management of Internet Technologies and Complex Services, funded by EC IST FP6
• I3CON - Industrialised, Integrated, Intelligent Construction, funded by EC NMP FP6
• PAN - Programmable Ad Hoc Networks, funded by UK EPSRC research council
• Technological Education Institute of Athens, Archimedes PA_CO_CLIR Project (Parallel Content Based Cross Language Information Retrieval), funded by the Greek General Secretariat for Research & Technology