I am a professor of computer science at Rutgers university since 1979. I received my Ph.D. degree from SUNY at Stony Brook in Applied Mathematics and my BS degree in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Ioannina, Greece. My research interests in the past varied from algorithms(Numerical and Non-Numerical), Supercomputing and Parallel Computing as well as building large scale software. PYRROS a parallel computing software that was built with my ex student Tao Yang, now a professor at UCSB in California, won the ACM test of time award in 2014. My software developed at Rutgers in the late 90's on search engines became a startup company called Teoma in 2000. Teoma was bought by Ask Jeeves in September 11, 2001 and it powered the search for Ask Jeeves for 100 of millions of queries per day. Ask Jeeves in 2005 was bought by IAC a large conglomerate of major American Companies. I spent 10 years away from Rutgers as a CEO of Teoma and later the Chief technologist for Ask.com. As an Executive Vice President of Ask.com I run the development of products and managed over 200 engineers. I returned to Rutgers in 2010 and spend time teaching, and developing a new system that integrates information from the web. The first application of the new software is music where it integrates databases such as Discogs, Musicbrainz, YouTube and Wikipedia in a way that it can recommend songs to a user. The research uses machine learning as well mathematical distances between entities derived from the massive databases. The databases contain over 50 million songs and computations require sophisticated sparse matrix techniques and parallel computing to be able to compute distances like cosine distance between musicians and between songs. I have published over 50 papers and have over 15 patents. I have stared on TV commercials for ask.com during 2005.
Department of Computer Science