Behavioral Signals - The Team

What We Do

We are bridging the communication gap between humans and machines by introducing emotional intelligence, from speech, into conversations with AI. We have created the fastest evolving and most robust emotion AI, enabling everyone to add emotion and behavioral recognition to their own software solutions, through the Oliver API. Whether it’s for a virtual assistant on a mobile phone, on the web, in a car, on a smart speaker, or for a social robot, an interactive child’s toy, a robotic carer, companies, developers or DIY enthusiasts can now design and build engaging interactions which can seamlessly benefit from our internationally acclaimed speech emotion recognition technology. Our production-level Oliver ΑPI, offers a rich variety of emotional and behavioral metrics and allows both real-time and batch audio processing, and can readily support heavy-duty applications.

Our Founders

Driven by a passion to bring our ground-breaking patented speech-to-emotion and speech-to-behaviors technologies to market, Professors and Scientists, Alex Potamianos and Shri Narayanan founded Behavioral Signals in 2016. With the goal of enhancing and forever changing the world of business, technology is at the core of what we do. Our algorithms analyze human emotions and behaviors, transform data into usable information, and lead to making better business decisions and increasing profits. Until now, human emotion has been considered impossible to quantify, and impossible to measure. With our patented analytics engine, we use science to measure and interpret the “how” part of human interactions.

The Team

CEO

Rana Gujral

Rana Gujral is an entrepreneur, speaker, and CEO at Behavioral Signals. He founded machine learning SaaS startup TiZE and led TiZE through formative traction until its acquisition by Alchemy. Prior to TiZE, Rana affected the turnaround of Cricut’s EBITDA position by $112MM within a span of 2 years. Cricut (NASDAQ: CRCT) closed its IPO at a $4.4+ billion valuation in March 2021. In addition, Rana held leadership positions at Logitech S.A. and Kronos Inc., where he was responsible for the development of best-in-class products.

Rana is an active investor and an advisor to several startups. He’s a contributing columnist at TechCrunch and Forbes and has been recognized as ‘Entrepreneur of the Month’ by CIO Magazine, awarded ‘US-China Pioneer’ by IEIE, listed as a ‘Top 10 Entrepreneur to follow’ by Huffington Post, and an ‘AI Entrepreneur to Watch’ by Inc Magazine. In 2020 he won Hacker Noon’s Noonie’s Award.

He has been a featured speaker at the World Government Summit, Mobile Web Congress, and Voice Summit among others. Rana holds degrees in Management, Finance, and Engineering from MIT Sloan, UMass, and TACK U.K. Rana has earned a variety of personal and product awards, and his work has been featured in TechCrunch, Forbes, Inc magazine, Huffington Post, Fast Company, NBC, Fox, and CBS.

“Artificial intelligence is helping businesses create experiences that naturally integrate with consumers’ everyday lives. Human communication is a complex process that depends on the words being spoken, as well as the way they are being expressed. We understand not only what is being said but how it is being said, the emotions, intentions, state-of-mind and behaviors of each person. I’m extremely optimistic about our potential.”

VP of Engineering

Nassos Katsamanis

Nassos is our tech lead and is based in Athens, Greece where he works with our global team of engineers. He is devoted to building cutting edge technologies into the company’s products and turn them into profitable real world solutions for our clients.

Nassos has conducted extensive research in behavioral signal understanding, working on his postdoc with Shri Narayanan at USC, LA. He is also an entrepreneur, having co-founded beenotes.com, the first voice-controlled apiculture application, and as its CTO, he brought the speech-enabled apiculture platform to market. Before that, he received the Diploma in ECE (with highest honors) and Ph.D. degree from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in Greece. After his postdoc at USC, and 3 years thereafter, he was a Research Scientist at the Robotic Perception and Interaction Unit of Athena RC in Greece, working on (distant) speech recognition, gesture recognition, deep learning, audio saliency estimation and multimodal signal processing.

In his leisure time, he enjoys hiking, painting, and playing on a local soccer team.

Chief Scientist & Co-founder

Shri Narayanan

There is a lot that we can say about Shri, our Chief Scientist. In fact, there is an entire wikipedia page about his many accomplishments. He is a pioneer in human-centered information processing and communication technologies, with a special emphasis on behavioral signal processing and informatics.

Shri brings his vision to the team, encouraging new ways of thinking. He informs and inspires us to reach beyond what is possible today, setting new standards for tomorrow.

Granted, Shri is a very busy person, but in his leisure time he enjoys playing the citar.

He is a graduate, with an M.S. Engineering and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering, of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and is an Andrew J. Viterbi Professor of Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC). Shri holds appointments as Professor of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Linguistics, Psychology, Neuroscience and Pediatrics and is the founding director of the Ming Hsieh Institute. Prior to USC, Shri was with AT&T Bell Labs and AT&T Research from 1995 to 2000. At USC, he founded and currently directs the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL).

 

Co-founder

Alex Potamianos

A rare mix of scientist and businessman, Alex is a well-regarded innovator in the field of speech and natural language processing, interactive voice response systems and behavioral informatics. He has over 20 years of leadership experience both in the corporate and entrepreneurial sides of business. His background includes working at AT&T Labs-Research, Bell Labs and Lucent Technologies and is a co-founder of Alesman.

“Technology has become ubiquitous in our society as algorithmic capabilities expand and increasingly disruptive ideas are brought forth. Businesses, now more than ever, can take advantage of this technology in order to be increasingly efficient, improve quality, and reduce costs. Our products accomplish that and more

Alex Potamianos

His academic achievements have gone hand in hand with his extensive research work, receiving his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Engineering Sciences from Harvard University and later his MBA from the Stern School of Business, NYU.

Alex lives in Los Angeles where he enjoys kayaking and sailing.

Marketing Lead

Vicki Kolovou

Vicki is Marketing Lead at Behavioral Signals. Born in Australia but living between the UK and  Greece, Vicki is an expert in brand identity and digital marketing strategy, working with companies across many industries including tech, tourism, ehealth, food processing, fashion and furniture.
As a business woman, producer and active supporter of the startup ecosystem, Vicki has co-founded several successful ventures, including Tech Talks Central, a web radio platform that interviews technologists, scientists and researchers, broadcasting live from within tech events.

She loves meeting and talking with people from all over the world, and has a strong belief that you learn at every stage of the development process. Even from failures!

Director of Machine Learning

Theodoros Giannakopoulos

Theodoros is Director of Machine Learning at Behavioral Signal Technologies. Based in Greece, Dr. Giannakopoulos has multiple degrees, including a Ph.D. in the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, University of Athens.

In addition to his work with Behavioral Signals, he is also teaching Multimodal Information Processing and Analysis in the Data Science Master of IIT, NCSR.  He is the co-author of more than 70 publications in journals and conferences, and also co-author of the book “Introduction to Audio Analysis: A MATLAB Approach”.

His accolades include winning two best-paper awards at MMSP2007 and ICMLA2010 and being ranked in the top 0.5% of Python users according to gitawards.com. He is an enthusiastic and active member of the open-source community.

 

Product Manager

Meropi Topalidou

Meropi is the Product Manager at Behavioral Signals. She has a BSc in Applied Mathematics (UoC, Heraklion), MS in Information Technologies in Medicine and Biology (UoA, Athens), and a Ph.D. from Inria Sud-Ouest Bordeaux, France in Computational Neuroscience. Her research focused on identifying the underlying mechanisms of decision-making, more specifically how goal-directed actions transform into habits. As a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), she worked on speech perception and production.

She is an extremely motivated and results-driven product manager. Her research experience, innate curiosity, creativity, and unmatched attention to detail make her confident in her ability to come up with gripping solutions for any kind of problem. She works best in challenging, fast-pacing, and collaborative environments, where she can constantly develop her skills and grow professionally. She believes in the power of good communication.

Meropi spends a lot of time outdoors, enjoying rock climbing, SUP and kayaking, playing tennis and basketball, biking or riding her motorcycle.

VP of GTM

Jay Leano

Jay has over ten years of experience at high-growth companies focusing on the mid-market and enterprise space. He’s built and scaled high-performing sales teams – accelerated demand generation, and uncovered new market segments. He’s a well-rounded sales leader that is passionate about professional and personal growth. His core strengths lie in scaling teams, sales execution, lead gen, ABM, go-to-market strategy, and accelerating growth from Seed to Series B.

Marketing Manager

Popi Paraschaki

Popi is Marketing Assets Manager at Behavioral Signals. She has professional experience in communication, PR and project management. She’s worked for large advertising agencies managing communication campaigns for big organizations and has gained vast experience in digital marketing. She has expertise in the fields of e-health, F&B, and architecture. She has a passion for creativity, teamwork, and good results. In her spare time, she loves being with her daughters, meeting with friends, and enjoying small getaways in nature.

Head of Business for LATAM

Ronald Goldstein

Ron is an entrepreneurial cross functional senior executive with 20+ years of global payments: Cross border transactions, financial services, fin-tech, e-commerce, mobile pay, SaaS, biometrics, AI, mobile top-ups and payment API’s developing business, alliances, partnerships, country strategies and international sales. He is working on business development in the LATAM region for Behavioral Signals.

R&D Software Developer

Ledion Sotiri

Ledion is an R&D Software Developer at Behavioral Signals with an extensive knowledge of system analysis and software engineering for networks, including mobile communications. He’s also prolific in image and video processing. With a strong mathematical background, he excels in analytical thinking and probabilities analysis.

When Ledion is not tinkering away with writing code he loves to read about philosophy and psychology, interpreting human behaviors, while also looking up towards the stars in his spare time.

Machine Learning Engineer

Dimitris Sgouropoulos

Dimitris has a BSc Degree in Informatics and an MSc Degree in Signal and Information Processing and Learning. He’s working with the Machine Learning team at Behavioral Signals.

He has worked as a Research Assistant at the National Centre of Scientific Research “Demokritos” in the field of Machine Learning with multimedia content.

In his spare time, Dimitris likes to relax by playing computer and board games with friends.

Senior Platform Engineer

Spyros Georgiladakis

Spiros is a Senior Platform Engineer at Behavioral Signal Technologies. Based in Greece, Spiros has a M.Sc. in Electronic and Computer Engineering from the Technical University of Crete. In addition to developing the Behavioral Signals platform, he is the Founder of web design and development company, Websphere.

His background includes working as a software engineer for Behavioral Informatix, and as a research assistant for the Technical University of Crete and the Athena Research and Innovation Center.

He also speaks Greek, English and Spanish!

Machine Learning Engineer

Petros Mitseas

Petros is a Machine Learning Engineer at Behavioral Signals. He received his Diploma of Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and his MSc in Artificial Intelligence from NCSR Demokritos. His background includes developing software for modern industrial applications.

He is very interested in the challenging task of using AI to solve real-life problems. In his free time, he enjoys spending time with friends and family and -as a car enthusiast- going on road trips.

Machine Learning Engineer

Lefteris Kapelonis

Lefteris is a Machine Learning Engineer at Behavioral Signals. He received his M.Eng. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at NTUA.

During his dissertation, he conducted research on NLP and dialogue systems. His main interest is bridging the gap between ML research and real-world applications.

Lefteris enjoys reading, running, and playing computer games in his free time.

Machine Learning Engineer

Nikos Antoniou

Nikos is a Machine Learning Engineer at Behavioral Signals. Recently, he received the Diploma of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) from the School of ECE at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA).

During his thesis, he studied the field of Adversarial Machine Learning, conducting research on the robustness of Neural Networks against worst-case adversaries. He is interested in multiple aspects of ML research, spanning diverse domains and applications.

In his free time, he enjoys reading novels, listening to music, and spending time with friends.

VP of Analytics

Manolis Tsangaris

Manolis is based in Athens, Greece where he leads our product development and business analytics teams. He works directly with clients to understand their pains, workflow and iterate solutions with our engineering team based on our core technology. We call Manolis, our unconventional thinker., because he is not tied to mainstream thinking in order to create a solution.

His long time experience includes Chief Technology Officer & Architect at Sinartia Technologies and he holds a Ph.D. and a Master’s in Sciences in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an Engineering Degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens. He has participated in two Silicon Valley Startups as a multiprocessing expert and Senior Architect, and two Boston based startups, as a technical leader and operations director. He has also contributed his technical leadership in two EU funded projects with the University of Athens, Greece. He has worked with  AT&T/Lucent Bell Labs from 1995 through 2001.

He holds two US patents in distributed multi processing for Electronic Design Automation and cell phone micro-location sensing.

Manolis loves to preserve traditional Greek music from his island home of Karpathos through recording, archiving and production.

Machine Learning Engineer

Antonia Petrogianni

Antonia holds a Diploma (Integrated Master’s) in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Thessaly, specializing in key research domains such as music information retrieval, speech emotion recognition, and multimodal deep learning.

With prior experience as a research associate at the Computational Intelligence Laboratory of the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications of NCSR “Demokritos,” Antonia now contributes her expertise as a valued member of the Machine Learning team at Behavioral Signals.

Outside of her professional pursuits, Antonia finds joy in embarking on road trips and immersing herself in music during her leisure time.

Machine Learning Engineer

Sofia Eleftheriou

Sofia is a Machine learning engineer at Behavioral Signals. She holds a master’s equivalent degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA).

Over the past years, Sofia has made significant contributions as a Research Associate at the Computational Intelligence Laboratory of the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications at NCSR “Demokritos.” Her primary research interests lie in multimodal machine learning and deep learning, with a particular passion for speech-related applications. She is currently pursuing her PhD studies, jointly affiliated with NCSR Demokritos and the Department of Informatics at the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB). Her doctoral research centers on “Behavioral Analysis in Human Communication using Deep Learning.”

In her free time, Sofia is an avid traveler, exploring new cultures and destinations around the world. She is also an enthusiastic reader with a deep love for books and enjoys delving into various literary genres. Additionally, she has a keen interest in the art of acting, which she actively pursues as a hobby.

Full Stack Software Engineer

Theodoros Psallidas

Theodoros Psallidas is a Full-Stack Software Developer at Behavioral Signals, combining his expertise in machine and deep learning applications with software development skills. He holds a Ph.D. in progress from the University of Thessaly and an M.Sc. in Data Science from the University of Peloponnese. Theodoros’ experience includes roles as a Machine Learning Engineer at NCSR Demokritos and a Full-Stack Software Engineer in the private sector.

In his leisure time, he enjoys playing with his dog and traveling.

Data Annotator

Ero Lefa

With a rich background in theater, radio, and management, Ero is passionate about supporting talent and nurturing creative vision with her work.

She is a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts – New York and The Barrow Group Theater. Having lived and studied in both New York and Europe, Ero brings a global perspective and a rich cultural understanding to her work. Her experiences in diverse artistic communities have shaped her ability to connect with people from all walks of life, fostering collaboration and synergy among creative professionals.

She is a gym rat, a habitual contrarian and an undercover nerd who enjoys going down intellectual rabbit holes and debating counterfactuals.

Data Annotator

Venetia Kyritsi

Venetia is a data analyst, annotator, and communications professional in the fields of Tech, AI, Health Tech, Health and Wellness, event management, international delegations, integrated marketing campaigns, new media marketing, social media content creation, curation, and project management. She is a firm believer that it is time to put the EQ into IQ and start developing soft skills in all industries. I love my dog and my cat, swimming, going to the theater, and binge-watching series.

Scientific

Advisory Board

Dr. Ben Goertzel

Dr. Ben Goertzel

Goertzel is the CEO and founder of SingularityNET, a project combining artificial intelligence and blockchain to democratize access to artificial intelligence. He was a Director of Research at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He is also the chief scientist and chairman of AI software company Novamente LLC; chairman of the OpenCog Foundation; and advisor to Singularity University. Goertzel was the Chief Scientist of Hanson Robotics, the company that created Sophia the Robot.

He is a member of Behavioral Signals’ Scientific Advisory Board

Dr. Joscha Bach

Dr. Joscha Bach

Joscha Bach is an AI researcher who has worked and published about cognitive architectures, models of mental representation, emotion, motivation, social modeling, and multi-agent systems. His cognitive architecture MicroPsi builds on a framework for simulating agents as neuro-symbolic spreading activation networks, situated in a simulation environment or fitted with robotic bodies. Joscha earned his Ph.D. in cognitive science from the University of Osnabrück, Germany. He is especially interested in the philosophy of AI, and in using computational models and conceptual tools to understand our minds and what makes us human. He has taught computer science, AI, and cognitive science at the Humboldt-University of Berlin, the Institute for Cognitive Science at Osnabrück, and the MIT Media Lab, and authored the book “Principles of Synthetic Intelligence”.

He is a member of Behavioral Signals’ Scientific Advisory Board

Dr. Kai-Fu Lee

Dr. Kai-Fu Lee

Dr. Kai-Fu Lee is the Chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures and the President of Sinovation Ventures’ Artificial Intelligence Institute. Sinovation Ventures, managing US$2.7 billion in dual currency investment funds, is a leading venture capital firm focusing on developing the next generation of high-tech companies. Prior to founding Sinovation in 2009, Dr. Lee was the President of Google China, and a senior executive at Microsoft, SGI, and Apple. Dr. Lee received his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Columbia University, his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, and Honorary Doctorate Degrees from both Carnegie Mellon and the City University of Hong Kong. He is the Co-Chair of the Artificial Intelligence Council for the World Economic Forum Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He has appeared in Times 100 in 2013, WIRED 25 Icons, Asian Business Leader 2018 by Asia House, and was followed by over 50 million users on social media.

He is a member of Behavioral Signals’ Scientific Advisory Board

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