Research Interests * Machine learning, pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, educational software, human-computer interaction, user interfaces, multimedia, python, Java, C#, web applications, and quantum computing. Awards and Honors * Bill Gates ThinkWeek research paper, Microsoft Corp. * Ph.D. qualifying examination in artificial intelligence (passed with distinction), Stanford University. * Scholarship of the Greek Scholarship Foundation. * Greek Mathematical Society award, national competition.

Director of Machine Learning @ From January 2014 to May 2015 (1 year 5 months) San Mateo, CASenior Software Engineer @ Design and development of an evaluation system for IP-based prediction of user location. The system employed user quality metrics and it uncovered a glitch in Google's existing prediction system which, in turn, led to significant improvements of user metrics. Design and development of a supervised machine learning system for site quality evaluation and an unsupervised learning system for site quality clustering -- both based on the contents of the sites. From July 2010 to December 2011 (1 year 6 months) Moutain View, CASenior Research Scientist @ Research and development of online advertising models using machine learning and graph-theoretic techniques. Design and development of machine learning real-time auction models and optimization models for traffic allocation and regulation. Development of feature selection tools and infrastructure. From 2008 to 2010 (2 years) Principal Research Scientist @ Research, architecture and development of the company's search engine. Specifically, machine learning infrastructure, data processing and algorithms, relevance functions, ranking features and related components. From November 2007 to June 2008 (8 months) Senior Research Scientist @ International Search Relevance Team, Yahoo! Inc. * Research and development on improving web-search relevance in international markets using machine learning. * Design and development of a platform for click-data processing and modelling. Development of relevance functions trained with click data. * Design and development of a relevance function for Korean web search. According to Yahoo metrics, the function produced dramatic improvements and outperformed all existing relevance functions including previous Yahoo functions, Google and NHN (the latter by about 30%). From March 2006 to November 2007 (1 year 9 months) Software Design Engineer @ Tablet PC Handwriting Recognition Research, Microsoft Corporation. Research and development of a specialized type of neural networks (comparative networks) for classifier aggregation as well as sorting and ranking (currently applied to handwriting recognition and ink-segmentation; to be applied to web page ranking). Development and evaluation of a small theory to formalize training neural network classifiers with heterogeneous data. Development of enhanced training methods for Tablet's handwriting recognition system. Development of Italian handwriting recognition system. Work on improving the mouse drivers for ink collection on Microsoft collector software (used to collect ink training data for the tablet). Development of tools for cleaning up language dictionaries and augmenting them using large corpora. From January 2002 to March 2006 (4 years 3 months) Adjunct Professor @ From September 1997 to January 2002 (4 years 5 months) Heraklion, Crete, Greece

John Drakopoulos is skilled in: Algorithms, Text Mining, Online Advertising, Pattern Recognition, Software Design, Java, Machine Learning, C#, Python, Neural Networks, Artificial Intelligence, Hadoop, Computer Science, Distributed Systems, Web Applications