Athanasios Podaras

Background

About Athanasios Podaras

Working with information technologies has been a great challenge for me since my Masters' studies that i completed in 2005. Throughout that period and due to my BSc degree in Agriculture, i started realizing that research in the ICT field would assist me in applying IT practices in multiple disciplines. Thus, i decided to join the PhD study program (field: Information Management) at the same faculty which i completed in 2010. In 2007 i joined the software applications division at Alpha Bank Greece where i obtained significant experience that boosted highly my professional career in information technologies, as i had the opportunity to write code, join interesting projects regarding big data solutions, as well as to attend multiple training seminars regarding ERP, Business Intelligence and IT project management solutions. Moreover, i had the honor and opportunity to collaborate with business continuity external consultants in terms of the recovery of core ICT banking procedures. In 2013, i decided to return "home"(for me home=research either at universities or research institutions) and join a European Project at the Faculty of Economics, Technical University of Liberec, Czech Republic. I served as a postdoc researcher in the field of crisis management supported by modern information technologies. The topic was highly challenging and motivating. Since 2015, i have been focusing on the application of Machine Learning and big data tools in business continuity and risk management in several sectors, especially towards the optimization of recovery processes. I am highly enthusiastic in adopting ML (decision trees, classification, regression analysis, random forests, k-NN, SVM, Naive Bayes, synthetic data augmentation, R scripts, R plots for data representation) and Business Intelligence (Data Mining, Data warehousing, SQL for OLAP, Databases, Association Rule Mining) tools regarding basic and applied research in charting multidisciplinary business continuity (BCM), disaster and risk management (RM) policies. I have developed and published my own BCM pattern for the proactive estimation of recovery timeframes and business function criticality ranking, entitled Business Continuity Points, which i have tested in the domains of higher education and agribusiness with success (also published work). Considering big data as the big asset for modern enterprises, organizations and public institutions i am open to collaborate with any researchers/organizations/enterprises share with me common interests. With best regards Dr Athanasios Podaras