Career Profile

Incisive and resourceful AI Engineer with extensive experience in Generative AI (GenAI), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Machine Learning (ML). My professional journey spans academic and industry settings, contributing to projects in the private and public sectors.

Currently, I'm Envisso's AI Lead, where I use Generative AI to transform merchant risk into a growth strategy for payments companies. Previously, I held positions as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at University College London, where I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science, and as a Machine Learning Researcher at Queen Mary University of London. I also hold an M.Sc. in Information Security and an M.Eng. in Software Engineering.

Experience

AI Lead

Feb 2024 - Present

  • Spearheading the company's strategic vision in utilizing Generative AI (GenAI) to transform merchant risk into a growth strategy for payments companies.
  • Designing and implementing agentic pipelines that collect and transform unstructured online data into actionable insights for business analysts and risk managers.
  • Enabling company employees to make use of cutting-edge GenAI tools and processes to increase productivity.

Leadership Generative AI (GenAI) Large Language Models (LLMs) Natural Language Processing (NLP) Machine Learning (ML)

Senior Data Scientist

Jul 2021 - Feb 2024

  • Spearheaded the development and improvement of a GenAI-powered Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) application from inception to production for a major bank when the GenAI and RAG fields were at their inception.
  • Designed and implemented from scratch a fully bespoke evaluation framework for said RAG application.
  • Worked on and/or led various other projects for different clients, including designing and implementing ML and NLP models for a global Robotic Process Automation (RPA) company, prototyping a solution to address common bottlenecks in Document Understanding projects using synthetic data, and helping a leading UK-based grocery chain conduct basket analysis and customer behavior analytics.
  • Conducted interviews for prospective data scientist hires.
  • Guided and supported the professional development of junior data scientists.

Generative AI (GenAI) Large Language Models (LLMs) Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) Natural Language Processing (NLP) Machine Learning (ML)

Data Scientist

Jan 2021 - Jun 2021

  • Obtained security clearance for a government client project, developing classification pipelines using state-of-the-art (at the time) models such as BERT, XGBoost, and Random Forest, while visualizing data and extracting actionable insights for stakeholders.
  • Designed and maintained a data quality pipeline to ensure report accuracy.
  • Guided and supported the professional development of junior data scientists.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) Machine Learning (ML) Data Visualization Grant Proposal Writing Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Machine Learning Researcher

Sep 2019 - Aug 2020

  • Trained, evaluated, and optimized the performance of various Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing models (including XGBoost, Random Forests, BERT, and Logistic Regression) for the identification of online hate speech.
  • Investigated the impact of engineered features on the accuracy and efficiency of hate speech classifiers, driving improvements in model performance.
  • Assessed the influence of different dataset annotation techniques on the performance and reliability of online hate speech classifiers, contributing to the development of more robust detection methods.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) Machine Learning (ML) Microsoft Azure Academic Research

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow

Aug 2016 - Jul 2019

  • Awarded a prestigious Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship as part of the Privacy & Usability Innovative Training Network.
  • Employed Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing techniques (Word Embeddings, LDA, Sentiment Analysis, Computer Vision) to investigate the use of direct-to-consumer genetic testing by far-right groups for promoting racist ideologies.
    Media Coverage The Times, StatNews
  • Conducted three large-scale studies on social media platform datasets (Twitter, Reddit, 4chan), analyzing over 1.3 million comments. Leveraged NoSQL (MongoDB) for data storage, management, and transformation.
  • Performed a critical evaluation and synthesis of research within the genome privacy community, focusing on privacy-enhancing technologies for testing, storing, and sharing genomic data.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) Machine Learning (ML) NoSQL Academic Research Privacy

Visiting Researcher

Sep 2017 - Dec 2017

  • Designed and ran a survey on the public perceptions of direct-to-consumer genetic testing.

Qualitative Research Survey Design

  • Studied how health and genetic data is being handled under GDPR.

GDPR

Graduate Teaching Assistant

Oct 2014 - Jun 2015
University of the Aegean

Acted as a Teaching Assistant for the following courses:

  • Database Structures I.
  • Information System Analysis and Design.
  • Comprehending Data Structures using C and/or C++.
  • Learning the Java programming language.

Teaching

Co-Founder and Author

Feb 2011 - Nov 2013

  • In 2011 I co-created OSArena.net which was at the time the largest Greek community on Open Source Operating Systems and Software, featuring news, guides, and opinion articles on Linux, Android, Hardware, Hacking, Privacy, and Security. I was an active author until November 2013.

Opinion Blogging News Reporting Open Source

Skills & Proficiency

Selected Publications

Open-Source Projects

Oblivious Transfer Extensions: A concrete implementation of the IKPN03 protocol written in Java, using the SCAPI interface.
Java Cryptography
Daedalus: An academic schedule manager made for the department of Information and Communications Systems Engineering at the University of the Aegean.
Full Stack Development

Awards

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow Scholarship

2016 - 2019
University College London

Received a Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow scholarship for 3 years to investigate the societal challenges stemming from the rise of personal genomic testing. Acceptance Rate: 6%


University of the Aegean Scholarship

2015 - 2016
University of the Aegean

Received a scholarship for my M.Sc. studies at the University of the Aegean.