Regular Speakers

Pavlos Charonyktakis is the AI Tech Lead at Fairlo, where he leads the company’s AI strategy to transform operations across all functions, beginning with the engineering lifecycle. Previously, he was a Senior Consultant at Deloitte, leading technical teams, primarily focusing on high-impact life sciences and GenAI projects, while also contributing to a broader range of initiatives. Pavlos was the CEO and Co-founder of JADBio, having previously served as CTO (2019–2022). In these roles, he led the development of JADBio automated machine learning platform. 

He has also contributed to the development of the Biosignature Discoverer plug-in for identifying molecular signatures for the CLCbio bioinformatics platform as well as to a highly optimized machine learning and statistics library.  He received his B.Sc. in 2011 and his M.Sc. in 2015 from the Computer Science Department of the University of Crete. From 2009 until 2015, he had been a research assistant (with scholarship) at the Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas. He has been the author or co-author of 15+ journal and peer-reviewed conference and journal articles. He has also been the PI, WP leader, or coordinator of 4 European and National research grants.

Filippos Gouidis is a postdoctoral researcher at the Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH). He holds a PhD, an MSc, and a BSc in Computer Science, as well as an  MSc in Brain and Mind Sciences. His research interests include neurosymbolic AI, knowledge representation, and explainable AI.

Efstratios Manolakis originally moved to Germany to compete in professional water polo, playing in the Bundesliga as well as for the youth National team. After finishing school there, he began his studies in Physics, eventually earning both his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Duisburg-Essen, where he specialized in Random Matrix Theory and high-frequency data handling.  He subsequently won a European Scholarship at the University of Catania to pursue a PhD in Complex Systems. Most recently, he spent a year as a Visiting Researcher at CentraleSupélec in Paris. There, he deepened his work on Physics-Informed Neural Networks and assisted in teaching courses on Graph Theory and Python for time-series analysis.

Konstantina Orfanou received her Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Crete in 2023 and 2025, respectively. She is currently an R&D engineer at the Computer Architecture and VLSI Systems (CARV) Laboratory of the Institute of Computer Science (ICS) - FORTH. Her research interests focus on the systems aspects of AI, and she has extensive experience with PyTorch and machine learning systems.  

My name is Aikaterini Papadaki. I hold a B.Sc. in Physics and an M.Sc. in Advanced Physics from the University of Crete, Greece. Currently I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science and a member of the Signal Processing Laboratory at FORTH-ICS. My research focuses on nonlinear time-series analysis, Recurrence Quantification Analysis (RQA), and machine learning. In particular, I develop robust recurrence-based methodologies for the analysis of non-Gaussian and heavy-tailed signals, with applications in feature extraction, pattern recognition, and classification of complex data.

Stergios Plataniotis is a quantitative researcher at Thira Labs, where he develops and tests machine learning algorithms for the firm's quantitative and data-driven projects. His work focuses on bridging cutting-edge academic research in machine learning with practical applications in quantitative finance, bringing the latest methodologies from academia into production ready systems. He holds an MEng in Electrical and Computer Engineering and an MSc in Computer Science and Engineering, both from the Technical University of Crete, Greece. During his graduate studies, he conducted research on efficient exploration and aggregation in Ensemble Deep Reinforcement Learning, resulting in conference publications and ongoing contributions to the field. 

Georgia M. Tsanta is a postgraduate student in the Computer Science and Engineering program at the University of Crete and a research fellow at the Signal Processing Laboratory of the Institute of Computer Science at FORTH. She earned her BSc in Computer Science from the University of Crete in 2025. Her broader scientific interests encompass Machine Learning, Data Science, Time Series Analysis and Artificial Intelligence applications.  

Christos Tzagkarakis is a Research Scientist at the Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH-ICS), where he works on probabilistic time-series forecasting within the EU-funded TwinODIS project, and an AI Quant at Thira LLC. Previously, he was a Signal Processing & AI Advisor at BreezeLabs (Switzerland), an applied-AI research scientist in industry across Belgium (Focal Point) and the U.A.E. (Oculus Technologies), a Research Associate at FORTH-ICS, contributing to EU-funded projects on IoT security, cybersecurity for critical infrastructures, and AI for healthcare (SEMIoTICS, CyberSANE, AI4HEALTHSEC, MARVEL), and a Postdoctoral Researcher at Delft University of Technology, where he collaborated with Google on acoustic source localization and separation. He holds a PhD, MSc, and BSc from the University of Crete, has co-authored a book chapter and more than 25 peer-reviewed articles (h-index 10, 479 citations), and co-invented a US patent with Google on wideband acoustic source localization. His research focuses on machine learning, signal processing, and time-series analysis, with applications spanning probabilistic forecasting and decision-making for energy systems, quantitative finance, audio and acoustic processing, as well as IoT and cybersecurity analytics.