Basic Information

The point of this website is to support cooperation, not to advertise myself, but some information may be useful:

Mini-Biography: I went to school in Dortmund and Herdecke, then studied philosophy, general linguistics and modern history at Marburg and Hamburg universities, at King's College London and at Oxford University. I recieved my PhD in philosophy on a scholarship at the Center for Cognitive Science at Hamburg University with a thesis on "Realism and Reference", supervised by Prof. Wolfgang Künne. I have been teaching philosophy at Anatolia College/ACT since 1998 (interrupted by a fellowship at Princeton during my sabbatical in Spring 2006). [ACT is the higher education division of Anatolia College, a private, non-profit educational institution in Thessaloniki, which awarded its first university degrees in 1887.]
I am James Martin Research Fellow (part time) on "Future of Computing and Cognitive Systems" with the Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, Future of Humanity Institute, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford.

Activities

Apart from teaching (normally 8 sections per year) and academic research, I also do some other things :
(I also occasionally have what is called "a life", but that is a different matter.)

• Academic Project Work
• Coordinator of EUCogII. The "2nd European Network for the Advancement of Artificial Cognitive Systems, Interaction and Robotics" is an FP7 project with 1,9 mil.€ (2009-2012). We have 9 project partners and around 800 members, all of whom are European researchers in artificial cognitive systems.
• Coordinator of EUCogIII. A project to continue the EUCog network (2 mil.€, 2011-2014).
• Management Committee member for Greece of TIMELY, "Time In MEntaL activitY: theoretical, behavioral, bioimaging and clinical perspectives". TIMELY is a EU "Cooperation in Science and Technology" COST action that will run 4 years (2010-2014).
• Organizing Events
  • 2012
  • with Tom Ziemke: EUCog Members' Meeting, Odense, 25-26 August 2012
  • At the AISB/IACAP World Congress 2012, July 2nd to 6th, 2012:
  • Symposium on Turing Tests, Co-Organiser
  • Symposium on Computational Philosophy, Progam Committee Member
  • Natural/Unconventional Computing Symposium, Program Committee Member
  • with Markus Vincze: EUCog Members' Meeting, Vienna, 23-24 February 2012
  • EUCogII Workshop "Challenges for Cognitive Systems II", Oxford, 20-22 January 2012
  • 2011
  • with Mirjana Maleska: VII International Student Conference, Borjan Tanevski Memorial Fund "The role of Youth in European Society", Tetovo, 28-30 October 2011
  • with Tjeerd Andringa: EUCogII Members' Meeting on "Autonomous activity in real-world environments", Groningen, 10-11 October 2011
  • PT-AI 2011, Conference on Philosophy and Theory of AI, Thessaloniki, 3-4 October 2011
  • EUCogII Members' Meeting on "Embodiment - Fad or Future?", Thessaloniki, 11-12 April 2011
  • with Fabio Bonsignorio: "EUCogII-Euron Workshop: Challenges, Good Experimental Methodology & Benchmarking" at the "euRobotics Forum 2011" in Västerås, 8 April 2011
  • with Antoni Gomila: EUCogII Workshop "Challenges for Cognitive Systems", Rapperswil, 28-30 January 2011
  • ... and many other EUCog events in the past
  • Philosophical colloquium in Thessaloniki, "Philosophy on the Hill" (in English and Greek) - currently dormant.
• Website "Jobs in Philosophy" worldwide (since 1996; formerly a part of "PhilNet").
• Organization of the Borjan Tanevski Memorial Fund, esp. of an annual essay competition and an annual student conference since 2004, alternating between Skopje and Thessaloniki. (One of the very few activities between the two countries.)
• Mountaineering Club at ACT
• Chair of the Department of Philosophy & Social Sciences at ACT (2000-2004).
• Managing projects, developing software for dictionary editing, dictionaries on the WWW and concordance making (Seferis' poems) at the Center for the Greek Language of the Greek Ministry of Education.
 

P.S.: Despite having web sites online since the early days of the WWW (in the early 90ies), I had always resisted making a page about me - but it now appears that such a site is useful for academic communication and cooperation (rather than just self-promotion). This site was initially developed for my students on the Intranet (in 1999) but the teaching material is now on the Moodle system. The site was first made publicly available on the WWW in October 2007.

Incidentally, if you see grey dots at the intersections of the whites lines on these pages, especially the homepage, there is nothing wrong with your eyes; it's a version of the well known grid illusion, first described by L. Hermann in 1870.