Nikos Kanakaris

You can find my detailed CV here.

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Current status

  • I am a Postdoctoral Researcher working with Paul Bogdan in the CPS group at the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Southern California (USC)
  • Holding a Ph.D. in Graph Mining & NLP from the University of Patras (Content here)(Industrial Management and Information Systems Laboratory, supervisor: Nikos Karacapilidis).
  • Experience in research, end-to-end machine learning projects, full-stack software development and deployment.
  • Experience both in academia and industry.
  • BSc. in Computer Science from the Department of Informatics and Telematics, Harokopio University of Athens (supervisor: Dimitrios Michail).

Academic world

My research lies in the field of machine learning, particularly in the domain of graph mining, graph neural networks, natural language processing and large language models (LLMs). I am currently studying techniques related to topological deep learning, graph neural networks, hypergraphs, simplicial complexes, combinatorial complexes and I am really curious to investigate how these topological domains can potentially be utilized (both in theory and practice) in (i) the analysis of higher-order data (e.g. data from social networks, medical data, recommender systems, RAGs, software mining) and (ii) designing LLMs being aware of higher-order information.

Industrial & outer world

I have also worked outside of the academic world for many companies as a software engineer and as a freelancer on various multi-domain projects (not afraid of getting my hands dirty). Hence, I can natively operate both in academia and industry, in a similar fashion to a hybrid car.

In my free time, I love to listen to podcasts on Spotify, read books and work out. I am always curious about new applied engineering and automotive technologies. Thus, I frequently find myself experimenting with electronics such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi, 3D printing, CAD design, lathe and milling machines. Particularly, my passion is rapidly exploded when these technologies are combined with data collection, data analysis and machine learning.

I am also an active reviewer of programming books at Manning Publications and in various scientific Journals and conferences, including ECML, ECAI, Learning on Graphs (LoG), AIRE (9.588 IF), PLOS ONE, MDPI and IEEE.

My view on code

I try not to be dogmatized regarding programming languages and technologies (after all, they are just tools that help you with a specific task); each tool and language has its own purpose. However, most of my academic work is developed using Python. Thus far, for the industrial projects, I have developed many solutions in Python, JavaScript/Node.js and C++. Recently, I incorporated the Julia programming language into my tool set and I am using it (accompanied by Python) for data analysis tasks (e.g. manipulating data frames, providing descriptive statistics, and approaching basic classification problems). In my opinion, Julia has a lot of potential and everyone could benefit from using it.

You can freely contact me on any social media platform or by email.