Dr Alexis Petrounias

Academic Information

I am a computer scientist by training. I carried out my doctoral research at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London, in the United Kingdom. I studied under the supervision of Prof. Susan Eisenbach and Prof. Sophia Drossopoulou as part of the SLURP group and Distributed Software Engineering Group (2004 to 2008).

I was a researcher at, and partly funded by, the AETHER project, part of the EU’s Future and Emerging Technologies programme, studying self-adaptive embedded systems for pervasive computing (2005 to 2008).

Research Interests

I am interested in the design and implementation of concurrent languages and virtual machines.

Projects

AETHER (2005 – 2008), European Commission (EC) integrated project under the Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS), Information Society Technologies (IST), Future and Emerging Technologies (FET), 6th Framework Programme (FP6). Coordinated by the French Atomic Energy Commision (CEA) with 14 partners from 9 countries and a €6M budget, the project involved research in self-adaptive embedded systems for pervasive computing.

My research focused on concurrency and message passing, scheduling and fairness, and programming language design and virtual machine implementations

Publications

Fairness for Chorded Languages [pdf, bib] by Alexis Petrounias and Susan Eisenbach; 11th International Conference on Coordination Models and Languages, (COORDINATION 2009), Lisboa, Portugal; published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) 511, pages 86-105, Springer, June 2009.

A Featherweight Model for Chorded Languages [pdf, bib] by Alexis Petrounias, Sophia Drossopoulou, and Susan Eisenbach; Imperial College London, Department of Computing Technical Report, London, United Kingdom 2008.

SCHOOL: the Small Chorded Object-Oriented Language [pdf, bib] by Sophia Drossopoulou, Alexis Petrounias, Alex Buckley, and Susan Eisenbach; First Workshop on Developments in Computational Models (DCM), 32nd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP), Lisbon, Portugal; published in Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS) volume 135 issue 3, pages 37-47, Elsevier Press, March 2006.

Talks

The (Non) State of Venture Capital in Greece (2010), invited talk at the Executive MBA course of the American College of Thessaloniki, Greece.

Fairness for Chorded Languages (2010), paper presentation at the 11th International Conference on Coordination Models and Languages, (COORDINATION 2009), Lisboa, Portugal.

Getting The Scheduling of Chorded Languages Right (2007), invited talk at the Department of Computing Research Group Seminar, Imperial College London, United Kingdom.

Concurrency using Chords (2006), invited talk at the British Colloquium on Theoretical Computer Science, Swansea, United Kingdom.

SCHOOL: a Small Chorded Object-Oriented Language (2005), paper presentation at the 32nd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP), Lisbon, Portugal.

Teaching

Project Co-Supervisor (2006 – 2007) for final year students Demetris Nicolaou, Lefteris Volonakis, Xuefei Shen, and Shih-min Huang; assisted Prof. Susan Eisenbach at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London, United Kingdom.

Tutorial Assistant (2004 – 2005) for Network Security course; assited Dr. Naranker Dulay and Dr. Emil Lupu at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London, United Kingdom.

Student Work

Ph.D. in Software Engineering (2004 – 2008), SLURP group, Department of Computing, Imperial College London, United Kingdom; thesis in the field of programming language design, titled "On the Design of Chorded Languages" [pdf, bib]; supervised by Prof. Susan Eisenbach and Prof. Sophia Drossopoulou and examined by Dr. Maribel Fernández and Dr. Sebastian Hunt.

My research focused on modern concurrency abstractions for object-oriented programming languages (chords and the join calculus), and scheduler specifications and guarantees of liveness, fairness and runtime performance.

M.Sc. in Advanced Computing (2003 – 2004), Department of Computing, Imperial College London, United Kingdom; thesis in the field of program security, titled "Atropos: A Dynamic Policy Enforcement Framework"; supervised by Dr. Naranker Dulay.

My thesis focused on real-time byte-code transformation in virtual machines for the enforcement of policy-based security mechanisms.

B.Sc. in Computer Science (2000 – 2003), School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex, United Kingdom; thesis in the field of computation, titled "The Turing Machine Workbench"; supervised by Dr. Bernhard Reus.

My thesis focused on Turing machine encodings, simulation, visualisation, and programming.

International Baccalaureate (1998 – 2000), Anatolia College, Thessaloniki, Greece; thesis in the field of mathematics, titled "A Digital Cryptographic Voting Protocol"; supervised by Dr. Angelos Kalaroutis.

My thesis focused on distributed cryptographic voting protocols.

Trivia

My Erdős number is four, through the following sequence of co-authors: Prof. Susan Eisenbach (3): Prof. Barry Boehm (2): Prof. Gabriel M. Silberman (1). Until recently, it used to be five, through the following sequence of co-authors: Prof. Susan Eisenbach (4): Prof. Jeff Kramer (3): Prof. Dov M. Gabbay (2): Prof. Saharon Shelah (1).