Secondary Education in Zossimaea Experimental Public School (town of Ioannina, Greece); B.Sc. in Pure Mathematics, University of Ioannina (1979); M.Phil. Computer Science, University of Technology at Loughborough (1981); Ph.D. Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP), University of Cambridge (1985). Life member of Pembroke College. 

 

Professor of Mathematics and Informatics, Chairman (2009-2014) of Department of Economics at National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (member of the University since July 1992), where, besides his educational and research duties, he contributes managerially and organizationally in several levels. He has been the managing director of the Computing Lab of School of Law, Economics and Political Sciences (1995-2009), associate director (1996-2008) and director (2008-2010) of the MSc course on Applied Economics and Finance, Director of the Division of Mathematics and Informatics (2000-2009) and Department Vice Chairman (2007-09); University Senator (2009-2014). Currently, Director of the MSc course in Business Administration, Analytics and Information Systems. 

 

He has taught at the undergraduate level: differential and integral calculus, differential equations, linear algebra, computer science, computer programming. At the postgraduate and PhD level: optimization theory, advanced mathematical programming, management science/operations research, financial derivatives, quantitative methods (MBA program). As an invited professor (1990-1996) he has taught computer graphics and human computer interaction at the Department of Informatics, Athens U. of Economics. He has also taught mathematics at the Division of Physical Chemistry, U. of Ioannina (spring semester 1987) and numerical analysis at the Hellenic Air Force Academy (1989-90, fall semester). Visiting scholar at the U. of Cambridge (summers 1989, 1996). Adjunct Professor at the Lavern University California (Athens Campus, 1995-97) for management science, computer graphics and management information systems. Also taught quantitative methods at the MBA (2008-2016) and DEO (2016-) programmes of Hellenic Open University.

 

In his research, he develops theory and algorithms for numerical approximation and optimization calculations accompanied by software development for general use, which focus on data smoothing by sign changes in the divided differences and its applications to science, engineering, medicine and economics. He has identified procedures that solve routinely some challenging combinatorial optimization problems. He has published over 90 research papers in scientific journals, conference proceedings and volumes. He has developed Fortran software packages that are accessible to the public through the scientific library systems of the ACM Transactions on Mathematics Software and Computer Physics Communications. As a program developer, he worked on the IBM 3082 and CDC Cyber mainframes, the Sun SPARC Unix workstation, the Tesla K20 GPU processor, and on most desktop-like computers. 

 

He has studied as a grantee of the State Scholarship Foundation of Greece (undergraduate 1974-79 and PhD 1981-84) and, while a research student, received the ‘J. T. Knight Prize of Mathematics 1983’, University of Cambridge [3] . He has been awarded by the ‘National Contribution of Greece to IFORS 93 (International Federation of Operations Research Societies)’; ‘Best Student Paper Award of The 2007 International Conference of Computational Statistics and Data Engineering’ by the International Association of Engineers for the paper [31] presented at the World Congress on Engineering 2007, Imperial College, London; ‘Best Paper Award of The 2008 International Conference of Computational Statistics and Data Engineering’ by the International Association of Engineers for the paper [32] presented at the World Congress on Engineering 2008, London; «Certificate of Merit 2012» for [64]; and, «Best Paper Award 2013» for [67], and so on to the most recent ones being the best paper awards of the 2018 Conference on Bioinformatics (IMECS, Hong-Kong), and 2018 Conference on Computational Statistics and Data Engineering (WCE, London).

 

Since 1999, he acts also as an academic evaluator in national and international committees for tertiary education (Chairman of this committee is Professor Malcolm Pemberton, UCL, London). He is a member of scientific/organizing committees of international conferences (HERCMA Athens 1992-94-96-98-2001-2003-2005-2007-2009; ERCIM Computational Management /CSDA Econometrics Limassol 2003, Neuchatel 04, Limassol 05, Genève 07, Neuchâtel 08, Limassol 09, London 10; Co-chair of ICCSDE, WCE London 2007-08-09-10-11-12-13; 3rd OMS Optimization Methods and Software, Chania, Crete 2012). He has made over 70 presentations in world conferences. His CV has appeared in the international editions Who’s Who in the World, Who’s Who in Science and Engineering, Dictionary of International Biography, Pembroke College Who’s Who (Univ. of Cambridge).

 

Some praises that have been in public include those of Professor John Rice, founder of ACM TOMS, 18.10.1996 letter: ‘I found your paper on data fitting quite interesting. I have been interested in this question since 1950’s and your approach to the problem is a novel one that has the potential to be quite useful.’; Professor Philip Davis of approximation theory, referring to the divided differences approach for data smoothing at PowellFest 1996 Cambridge (27-30 July, 1996): ‘work of considerable social depth’; and, Dr. Jian Lu, Laurence Livermore National Laboratory: ‘I think this method – remark: [7], [8], [20] – has a great potential in signal and image processing… I am excited about it…’.