What was your previous role before Behavioral Signals?

Founder and Tech Lead of a startup working on (speech) tech to optimize beekeeping

What is your role at Behavioral Signals?

VP of Engineering: Keeping people calm and making things

What do you find most disruptive/ challenging at Behavioral Signals?

Integration of emotionAI into production to maximize returns

What kind of work would make you excited to get out of bed on Monday morning?

Keeping people calm and making things ?

Who are your role models and mentors?

That’s a hard one, going for a long answer. I guess I have different models for different roles (my father is probably my role model as a father, Messi is my role model as a football player ?). Similarly for mentors. I don’t think I have a single mentor for all things. For professional issues, I would say I mostly discuss with Alex Potamianos and Charalampos Bakolias

What professional mistakes have you’ve learned most from?

Not resolving disagreements as soon as possible to avoid conflict. Pay attention to this, people! ?

What is the biggest technological challenge in Emotion AI right now?

Using context

What is the biggest challenge for ML now? What breakthrough are you expecting in the future?

Real-world understanding and decision-making. Situations where decision-making requires other things you may not have data or a trained model for. More specifically, using context and properly accounting for the lack of it to make a useful decision. Much wanted breakthrough: Better explainability of results

What makes you happy?

Playing Catan Jr. with my kids ?

What makes you angry?

Exploitation of humans

What makes you dream?

Writing (especially when I am keeping journal)

What makes you get up and moooooove?

Competition

If you had a ‘warning’ label, what would it say in one word?

Dreamer (“What’s your biggest drawback? – I am a perfectionist” ?)

Can procrastination be useful?

Yes, but one needs to do it a lot to see the benefits

Post-its OR whiteboards?

Walls

Tea or coffee?

Tea

Food you never get bored eating?

Tangerines

Book or movie you would suggest for someone to read/see?

“Winky’s horse” (2005) and “The Antidote” by Burkeman

Who are you going to tag to do this interview next?

Giannis Karavasilis