Jazz, is an integral part of your musical influences, what artists and bands, contributed to your current style of music?


   I 've been introduced to jazz through the jazz fusion music of the 70s, 80s and 90s era with my first exposure to fusion being through Billy Cobham's "Spectrum". Being mostly a rock and metal music fan, the overall sound seemed familiar with the music content being completely new to my ears. This led me to find out artists like Marcus Miller and Hiram Bullock, ultimately leading me to Tribal Tech and the magic of Allan Holdsworth. This was a turning point for my musical endeavors, leading me to study straight-ahead jazz and bebop. I 've been deeply touched by the sheer volume and depth of John Coltrane's music, finding at times common ground with the improvisational thought process of Allan Holdsworth while at the same time I have been relentlessly listening to records of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon and Cannonball Aderley to name a few, for years. At a later stage, I was introduced to the music of Lennie Tristano, Warne Marsh and Lee Konitz and found the connection with the 90s-00s era of jazz stars like Mark Turner and Kurt Rosenwinkel. In the music that I hear and play, I am constantly cycling between acoustic and electric sounds with all of these influences emerging, depending on the band I play with and my mood. My current obsession these days is a NY-based guitarist called Tim Miller and I am an avid fan of Adam Rogers, Kurt Rosenwinkel and Chris Crocco, just to name a few.








   You have been awarded the “Best Guitar Performance” during Master-Jam, that was held in Ukraine, what was the experience, being among world renowned guitarists like?


   Master-Jam was an overwhelming experience; the whole concept was to make a series of live performances inspired by the various periods of jazz with ensembles comprised of random members of the festival. Each band was assembled at the night prior to the live performance and it was given 2 hours of rehearsal for preparing 3 songs each night. The whole process was really challenging and fun at the same time and it was a real honor for me to have been awarded. I also had the chance to play with jazz piano prodigy Joey Alexander who at that time was about 9 years old but his playing was absolutely amazing! Fortunately, I had the privilege to have been called once more in Odessa on 2016 as an honored guest, performing at the International Jazz Day festival in front of more than one thousand people at one of the biggest theaters in Odessa along with Odessa's jazz piano virtuoso Alexey Petukhov.




   Your studies, consist of CPU-GPU Cluster Architectures, allowing parallel processing - enabling faster execution of highly compute intensive tasks. What are the implications on your study, living in a highly technologically illiterate society?


   Well, not much to be honest! Other than most people not understanding what this thing is all about and getting questions like "Oh, since you know your way with computers, will you fix my Internet Explorer crashing?", I have not experienced any significant impact whatsoever related to societal reasons. I have the privilege to be the technical lead (something like a CTO) of MGroup (mgroup.ntua.gr), a very talented team situated in the Institute of Static Analysis and Seismic Research at the school of Civil Engineering in the National Technical University of Athens which is internationally present with cutting edge research activity. One of the issues that we face, being a research group in Greece, is lack of human resources as many promising students leave Greece in order to seek a better work and/or academic future abroad. This seems to be mostly a financial issue which is a direct consequence of the ongoing crisis which affects many countries. 







   Can an alternative use, of a biologically inspired Artificial Neural Network, that learns from its computing experience, be the solution for the ever increasing computational complexity and diversity of information, of future task-solving?


   Machine learning in general is a very hot topic nowadays with deep learning being in the forefront for the solution of very complex and diverse problems. As we speak, artificial neural networks are being used in the most popular sites and social networks in order to provide a custom-tailored experience to the end user and behavioral data to companies and people that need communicate with their audience. Self-learning algorithms are currently being investigated with AlphaGo being one of the most successful ones. The future is very intriguing and it is most certain that the automations that will occur from the mass application of these technologies will greatly affect our living experience.




   You have been among many musical groups including Burning Sticks, Curf, Ο3 and Mica Eio. Where can someone find you these days, and what are your future musical endeavors?


   Musically I am into jazz and its subgenres, more than ever with all of the bands mentioned being more or less a part of the past, maybe with the exception of Mica Eio and O3. Nowadays, I mainly work with the electric jazz band called Triplicity (www.triplicityband.com) with Panagiotis Bourazanis on bass and Panos Vassilopoulos on drums. Things with Triplicity are really interesting as we explore things both from a musical and sonic standpoint while at the same time, having the chance to collaborate with internationally upcoming or renowned jazz artists like Chad Lefkowitz-Brown and Pete Lockett. For the following months, Triplicity will be arranging and recording new original material which will be both audio and video recorded, with plans to present it both here and abroad. Other than that, I also play at Michael Evdemon's trio with the famous Nick Kapilidis on the drums and I also have the privilege to be part of the jazz pianist Aris Papadopoulos quartet. It is most certain that I will also resume working with my trio in the near future as well, playing along with Michael Evdemon and George Kostelettos.