Nikos Kanakaris

You can find my resume here.
You can find my detailed CV here.

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Current status

  • Working as a Data Scientist at efood (a brand of Delivery Hero)
  • Holding a Ph.D. in Graph Mining & NLP from the University of Patras (Content here)(Industrial Management and Information Systems Laboratory, supervisor: Nikos Karacapilidis).
  • Working as a Machine learning researcher for various EU and Greek-funded projects.
  • 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 current research aims to exploit existing techniques and methods from the fields of graph theory, graph mining, natural language processing, knowledge management and machine learning in order to improve graph-based text representation and graph-based natural language processing. I am interested in natural language processing, applied machine learning, and graph mining. I am currently studying techniques related to graph neural networks and graph-based natural language processing. In particular, advancing common natural language processing tasks, such as text classification, feature extraction and feature selection, using graph-based text representations, word embeddings, and graph neural networks.

An example of a representation of multiple textual documents as a single graph (graph-of-docs) is available on GitHub (link).

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 highlighting the power of the mind and work out. Along with my previous spiritual-oriented and wellbeing hobbies, 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 (recently, I bought the new Prusa printer), 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 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.