There are only two ways to live your life.
One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as though everything is a miracle.

-Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Brief info about me

I am currently serving as an adjunct professor at the Computer Science Department, University of Crete. Prior to that I had been a postdoctoral research fellow as well as an adjunct professor at the Applied Mathematics Department, Ecole Centrale de Paris (fellowship awarded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche), working at the Computer Vision and Medical Imaging group. I was also affiliated with INRIA-Saclay, where I had been part of the GALEN team. In 2007, I was finalist for the prestigious ERCIM Cor Baayen Award for the most promising young researcher in computer science and applied mathematics.

Research overview

My research interests span topics traditionally studied in branches of applied mathematics related to Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, Machine Learning, and Biomedical Image Analysis.

Scientific foundations: discrete optimization algorithms for visual computing

A very wide variety of tasks from the aforementioned areas can be elegantly formulated as discrete energy minimization problems. Much of my recent work has focused on the design and application of novel mathematical optimization techniques for these problems, a topic of fundamental importance that has attracted tremendous efforts over these recent years.

Due to the use of huge and richly structured datasets, these techniques have to overcome the key challenges of efficiently estimating approximately optimal solutions for problems of very large scale with energy functions that are highly non-convex. I am particularly interested in optimization algorithms for probabilistic graphical models such as discrete Markov Random Fields (MRFs), which, I believe, provide a very powerful and elegant framework for modeling and analyzing a wide range of tasks in visual computing.

Applications

I have deployed my methods in a variety of problems from the above fields including:

• deformable registration
• motion analysis and optical flow estimation
• image-based modeling and rendering
• texture synthesis
• image completion
• stereo matching
• 3D reconstruction of large scale natural environments
• segmentation and reconstruction of anatomical structures with prior knowledge
• clustering of skeletal muscle fibers
• unsupervised clustering
• photo-realistic models for animation and transitions of facial expressions

Professional activities

Programme committee for:
• 5th International Symposium on Visual Computing (ISVC) 2009
• IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2009
• IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2009
• European Conference in Computer Vision (ECCV) 2008
• IEEE International Conference on Pattern Recognition 2008 (ICPR 2008)
• IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2007
• IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2007
• 2009 International Symposium on Signal Processing, Image Processing and Pattern Recognition (SIP 2009)
• 2009 International Workshop on Computer Graphics, Multimedia and Security (CGMS-09)
• 11th Symposium on Advanced Concepts for Intelligent Vision Systems (ACIVS 2009)
• 4th International Symposium on Visual Computing (ISVC) 2008
• 2008 International Symposium on Signal Processing, Image Processing and Pattern Recognition (SIP 2008)
• 10th Symposium on Advanced Concepts for Intelligent Vision Systems (ACIVS 2008)
• 3rd International Symposium on Visual Computing (ISVC) 2007

Reviewer for:
• Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision
• SIAM Journal on Imaging Sciences
• Journal of Machine Learning Research
• IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
• International Journal of Computer Vision
• IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
• IEEE Transactions on Multimedia
• IEEE Signal Processing Letters
• Image and Vision Computing
• Computer Vision and Image Understanding
• Advances in Multimedia
• Information Sciences