Hi, I am a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Crete, Greece. Also, I am Head of the Information Systems Laboratory at the Institute of Computer Science of FORTH in Greece. The Institute is the Greek node of the ERCIM network of European research institutions in Mathematics and Computer Science.
I grew up in Greece where I finished School. Then I studied computer science in Karlsruhe, Germany, and completed a PhD in Osnabrueck, Germany, in 1989. I worked as an assistant professor in Osnabrueck until 1994, when I decided to move to the end of the world, namely down under. I held academic positions in Newcastle and Brisbane, Australia. I stayed in Austalia till 2001, my last appointment was Professor in Computing & IT at Griffith University in Brisbane. Australia is beautiful, but too far away from Europe where my roots and heart lie, so I moved back to Germany to the Computer Science Department of the University of Bremen. But finally I decided to return to Greece (the most difficult of my choices so far).
In the following you can find out more about my professional activities. Privately, my interests lie in reading, travelling, going to movies, hanging out with friends. All of the above were more important to me before I met Kostantina, who was silly enough to marry me. The Lord works in mysterious ways. Since March 2007 my life was transformed even more, with the birth of Vangelis. Since then I am studying in joy and amazement the development of a human being out of a very small and uncommunicative newborn.
My main interests lie in the area of knowledge systems: how to represent knowledge using logic and how to automatically deduce conclusions from knowledge. My specialisation is in nonmonotonic reasoning, which deals with incomplete and inconsistent information. Recently I have developed interests in applying knowledge systems to practical problems, in particular to electronic commerce, the world wide web (semantic web) and ambient intelligence.
Currently I participate in the following international projects:
