Nikiforos Pittaras

Nikiforos Pittaras



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About

(Updated March 2024)

I am a Machine Learning scientist, currently working with RL and ML methods for optimizing CDNs, as well as investigating AI incidents in the context of AI Safety.

In the past I’ve been involved in ML / AI Research and Engineering roles applied on different types of data (text, audio, images, video, tabular, multimodal data, etc.) for a diverse set of tasks (Argument Mining, Event Detection, Summarization, Video Concept Detection, Neurodegenerative Disease Prediction and others).

My academic background focused on knowledge-enriched Deep Learning methods for Natural Language Processing, and multimodal fusion approaches for Computer Vision.

You can find a 3-page CV here. Alternatively, please check out a tl;dr version below.

Education

  • PhD in machine learning, from the Informatics and Telecommunications department (DIT) of the University of Athens (UoA), co-supervised by the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications (IIT) of the National Center for Scientific Research Demokritos (NCSRD) , funded by the St. Niarchos 2017 Industrial PhD scholarships. My thesis focused on semantic augmentation of Deep Neural Network systems, titled “Beyond Deep Learning: Enriching Data Representations for Machine Learning Tasks”.

  • MSc in Signal and Information Processing and Learning from DIT of the UoA, focused on Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Computer Vision. My thesis focused on Deep Learning for multimedia, titled “Multimodal video classification with deep neural networks”.

  • BSc in Computer Science from the Computer Science and Engineering department of the University of Ioannina, focused in Artificial / Computational Intelligence, Image and Video Processing and Microelectronics. My thesis studied swarm intelligence approaches for Computer Vision, titled “Image registration with unified particle swarm optimization”.

Links to the theses are available in my CV above. A summary of academic project coursework can be found here.

Work Experience

Current role(s):

  • Senior Machine Learning Engineer at bunny.net, working on smart methods for CDN optimization.
  • ML Research Scientist at the Digital Safety Research Institute, working on public incident report analysis for AI Safety.

Past roles:

Research Interests

  • Machine Learning in text and multimedia
  • Neural networks and Deep Learning
  • Reinforcement Learning
  • AI Safety and Alignment 1

  1. Relevant activities can be found here↩︎