Nikolaos S. Papaspyrou

Professor at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens and a member of the Software Engineering Laboratory. I am interested in the theory and implementation of programming languages: semantics, type systems, compilers, static analysis, formal verification.

From October 2021, I am on leave from the NTUA. I work as a Software Engineer for Google, in the memory management team for the V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine.

From December 2017 to August 2019, I served as the Director of the Division of Computer Science.

From December 2015 to September 2016, I was on sabbatical, working with Google's compiler group in Munich on things related to the V8 JavaScript engine.

My curriculum vitae, including a full list of my publications. Also, in Greek.

Current and recent research projects

RELEASE: A high-level paradigm for reliable large-scale server software. An EU FP7 STREP project that aims to scale the radical concurrency-oriented programming paradigm to build reliable general-purpose software, such as server-based systems, on massively parallel machines, using Erlang/OTP.

Handling uncertainty in data intensive applications on a distributed computing environment. A project funded by the European Social Fund and Greek national funds through the Operational Program "Education and Lifelong Learning" of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF). It aims to introduce a new model of uncertain databases and define query answering mechanisms, suitable in this uncertain framework; to develop new algorithmic techniques and programming language infrastructure; and to exploit the efficient implementation of the proposed techniques by exploiting and extending existing technology and systems, such as Hadoop. See also the project's web page.

Recent and selected publications

Aggelos Giantsios, Nikolaos Papaspyrou and Konstantinos Sagonas, Concolic Testing for Functional Languages, Science of Computer Programming, vol. 147, pp. 109-134, November 2017.
Phil Trinder, Natalia Chechina, Nikolaos Papaspyrou, Konstantinos Sagonas, Simon J. Thompson, Stephen Adams, Stavros Aronis, Robert Baker, Eva Bihari, Olivier Boudeville, Francesco Cesarini, Maurizio Di Stefano, Sverker Eriksson, Viktoria Ford{'{o}}s, Amir Ghaffari, Aggelos Giantsios, Rickard Green, Csaba Hoch, David Klaftenegger, Huiqing Li, Kenneth Lundin, Kenneth MacKenzie, Katerina Roukounaki, Yiannis Tsiouris and Kjell Winblad, Scaling Reliably: Improving the Scalability of the Erlang Distributed Actor Platform, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 17:1-17:46, September 2017.
Eneia Nicolae Todoran and Nikolaos Papaspyrou, Concurrency Semantics in Continuation-Passing Style Fundamenta Informaticae, vol. 153, no. 1–2, pp. 125–146, June 2017.
Georgios Fourtounis, Nikolaos S. Papaspyrou and Panagiotis Theofilopoulos, Modular Polymorphic Defunctionalization, Computer Science and Information Systems, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 1417-1434, October 2014.
Prodromos Gerakios, Nikolaos Papaspyrou and Konstantinos Sagonas, Static Safety Guarantees for a Low-level Multithreaded Language with Regions, Science of Computer Programming, vol. 80, pp. 223–263, February 2014.
Georgios Fourtounis, Nikolaos Papaspyrou and Panos Rondogiannis, The Generalized Intensional Transformation for Implementing Lazy Functional Languages, in Proceedings of the 15th International Symposium on Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages (PADL ’13), vol. 7752 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 157–172, Rome, Italy, January 21–22, 2013.
Stavros Aronis, Nikolaos Papaspyrou, Katerina Roukounaki, Konstantinos Sagonas, Yiannis Tsiouris and Ioannis E. Venetis, A Scalability Benchmark Suite for Erlang/OTP, in Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGPLAN Erlang Workshop, pp. 33–42, Copenhagen, Denmark, September 14, 2012.
Nikolaos Papaspyrou and Konstantinos Sagonas, On Preserving Term Sharing in the Erlang Virtual Machine, in Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGPLAN Erlang Workshop, pp. 11–20, Copenhagen, Denmark, September 14, 2012.
Zhong Shao, Valery Trifonov, Bratin Saha and Nikolaos Papaspyrou, A Type System for Certified Binaries, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 1–45, January 2005.

Courses

Computer Programming, 1st semester (in Greek).
Programming Techniques, 2nd semester (in Greek).
Programming Languages I, 6th semester (in Greek).
Compilers, 8th semester (in Greek).
Programming Languages II, 9th semester (in Greek).
Software Engineering, 7th and 9th semester (in Greek).
Software-as-a-Service Technologies, 8th semester (in Greek).
Type Systems for Programming Languages, postgraduate (in Greek).
Programming Tools and Technologies for Data Science, postgraduate (in Greek).

In the past, I have also taught the following courses:

Software Engineering I and Software Engineering II (both in Greek), taught in the spring semester of 2000 while I worked as a short-term associate professor at the School of Electronic and Computer Engineering of the Technical University of Crete.

Books

Compilers (in Greek), ISBN: 978-960-266-135-2, Symmetria, 2002.
Programming Languages Pragmatics, by Michael L. Scott, 2nd edition (Greek translation), ISBN: 978-960-461-230-7, Klidarithmos, 2009.

Students

Michalis Papakyriakou
Angelos Manousaridis
Georgios Korfiatis
Katerina Roukounaki, 2011–
Nikolaos Vathis, 2012–
Aggelos Giantsios, 2013–
Panagiotis Theofilopoulos, 2014–
Diamanto Fotiou, 2016–
Vicky Kontoura, 2017–

Former PhD students

Dr. Prodromos Gerakios, PhD 2012, co-supervised with Kostis Sagonas
Dr. George Fourtounis, PhD 2014

Former diploma students and collaborators

This list is non-exhaustive (and, most probably, it will remain so).
Until Februart 2018, I have supervised more than 50 diploma projects.

Dimitris Konomis, MIT
Nick Giannarakis, Princeton University
Zoe Paraskevopoulou, Princeton University
Vrettos Moulos, UC Berkeley
Dr. George Karachalias, KU Leuven
Manos Koukoutos, EPFL
Dr. Panagiotis Vekris, UC San Diego
Dr. Niki Vazou, UC San Diego
Dr. Konstantinos Pouliasis, City University of New York
Dr. Vasilis Papavasileiou, Northeastern University
Dr. Spyros Hadjichristodoulou, Stony Brook University
Dr. Dimitrios Vekris, Université Paris-Est
Dr. Yannis Rouselakis, University of Texas at Austin
Dr. Christos Stergiou, UC Berkeley
Dr. Christos Dimoulas, Northeastern University
Dr. Antonis Stampoulis, Yale University
Dr. Michael Lampis, City University of New York
Dr. Dimitris Vardoulakis, Northeastern University
Dr. Vasileios Koutavas, Northeastern University
Dr. Dimitrios Vytiniotis, University of Pennsylvania

Activities

Conferences

OSS 2018, June 8-10, 2018, Athens, Greece; PC member.
ACM SAC 2018, PL track, April 9-13, 2018, Pau, France; PC member.
PCI 2017, Sepember 28-30, 2017, Larisa, Greece; PC member.
SCLIT 2017, September 25-30, 2017, Thessaloniki, Greece; PC member.
BCI 2017, September 21-23, 2017, Skopje, FYROM; PC member.
WAPL 2017, September 3-6, 2017, Prague, Czech Republic; PC member.
PLS11, July 12-16, 2017, Delphi, Greece; PC member, OC member.

Programming contests

Since 2006, I volunteer as a coach, problem setter and evaluator of students who participate in the Greek National Contest of Informatics. I am currently responsible for hosting the automated tutoring and grading system, Hellenico, in our laboratory. Every year since 2006, I have organized the preparation camp (site in Greek), for the contest's finalists, out of which the national teams are selected. I have also served as leader and deputy leader in many delegations of our national teams to the:

International Olympiad in Informatics:
- Croatia, 2007
- Egypt, 2008
- Bulgaria, 2009
- Canada, 2010
- Thailand, 2011
- Italy, 2012
- Taiwan, 2014
- Kazakhstan, 2015
- Iran, 2017
- Japan, 2018
Balkan Olympiad in Informatics:
- Bulgaria, 2009
- Montenegro, 2010
- Romania, 2018
Junior Balkan Olympiad in Informatics:
- Bulgaria, 2009
- Bulgaria, 2013
- Romania, 2018

Contact information

E-mail:
URL:	https://www.softlab.ntua.gr/~nickie/
Address:	National Technical University of Athens School of Electrical and Computer Engineering Division of Computer Science, Software Engineering Laboratory Polytechnioupoli, 15780 Zografou, Athens, GREECE.
Office:	School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, old building 1.1.21 (office), 1.1.25 (laboratory), see NTUA map. +30-210-7723393, +30-210-772509 (fax).
Home:	Archimidous 7, Pangrati, 11635 Athens, GREECE. +30-210-7524801.