Summary
I am an Assistant Professor at the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) and Head of the Spatial Analytics and Large-Scale Data Processing research group. My research focuses on designing core components for advanced data processing systems, with an emphasis on spatial data processing, hardware acceleration, and data management in heterogeneous distributed computing environments. Before joining HPI, I was an Assistant Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen (ITU). From 2019 to 2022, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Technical University of Berlin (TUB) and a junior fellow at the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD). I received my PhD (2019) from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), where I worked on query processing for spatial and temporal data exploration with Anastasia Ailamaki. Additionally, in 2016, I was a visiting PhD researcher at New York University (NYU). I obtained a Diploma M.Eng. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 2013.
Professional experiences
Assistant professor
Hasso Plattner Institute
Since 2. march 2025

Assistant professor
IT-Universitetet i København
From May 2022 to February 2025

Junior fellow
BIFOLD - Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data
Since 2. july 2021

Postdoctoral researcher
TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITAT BERLIN
From October 2019 to May 2022

Visiting research scholar
NYU Tandon School of Engineering
From July 2016 to October 2016

Visualization Imaging and Data Analysis Lab (VIDA)
Research Project: Real-Time Spatial Aggregation using GPU Rasterization
Supervisors: Prof. Juliana Freire and Dr. Harish Doraiswamy
Worked on Raster Join, a spatial aggregation algorithm that leverages the graphics rendering pipeline to support interactive response times to ad-hoc aggregation queries over arbitrary polygons.
Doctoral assistant
EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne)
From September 2013 to August 2019

Data-Intensive Applications and Systems Laboratory (DIAS)
• Research on spatial and temporal data management for exploratory applications.
• Presented work at premier database conferences (VLDB, SIGMOD, ICDE, SIGSPATIAL, SSDBM).
• Served as teaching assistant for various courses, such as a master course on Database Systems.
• Supervised master and bachelor students.
Intern
EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne)
From January 2013 to August 2013

Data-Intensive Applications and Systems Laboratory (DIAS)
Research Project: Efficient Time Series Bitmap Indexing through Quadtree-based Compression Supervisors: Prof. Anastasia Ailamaki and Prof. Thomas Heinis
Developed a compressed time series index, RUBIK, that encodes time series values as bitmaps and applies Quadtree-based decomposition to enable searching the bitmaps using both value and time constraints.