Bio

I am an assistant professor in computer science at the University of Southern California. I received a PhD from the CMU Robotics Institute (Dec. 2017) and a MS from MIT. I lived for four years in Japan, where I studied at The University of Tokyo (M.Eng.) and worked as a researcher at Square Enix. I have also worked as a research associate at the University of Washington, Computer Science & Engineering Department and as a research specialist at MIT. I did my undergraduate studies in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA).

You can download my CV here. This is my Google Scholar page.

Awards

I have received the Best Evolutionary Machine Learning Paper Award at GECCO 2023.

I was one of three finalists for the 2023 Bodossaki Foundation Distinguished Young Scientists Award in Applied Science, an award given to Greek scientists under the age of 40.

I was the sole recipient of the 2022 Agilent Early Career Professor Award award.

I was awarded the 2022 NSF CAREER award, titled "Enhancing the Robustness of Human-Robot Interactions via Automatic Scenario Generation".

I was nominated for the Best Systems Paper Award at HRI 2023, for the Best Cognitive Robotics Paper Award in IROS 2019, received the Best Enabling Technologies Award at HRI 2015, was nominated for the same award at HRI 2018 and was nominated for the Best Paper Award at the International Symposium of Robotics (ISR) 2013.

Our paper "Differentiable Quality Diversity" received an oral presentation at NeurIPS 2021.

I received the CMU Gordon-Bell, MIT Dupont, MIT Marie-Vergottis and Onassis Foundation Fellowships and the Propondis Foundation Honorary Scholarship. I also received the Monbukagakusho (Japanese Government) Scholarship for my studies in Japan.

Demos

We developed a robot-assisted assembly capability in a human-robot hybrid workcell

 

We presented a demo of our robotic hair brushing capability in NeurIPS 2019.

 

We made this fun feeding demo for Thanksgiving 2019!

I lead the development of a robot enabled dining scenario in the Personal Robotics Lab (left). I had the chance to present the demo to Secretary Clinton (right).