What was your previous role before Behavioral Signals?

Doing research and finishing my MEng in Electrical & Computer Engineering at NTUA and working as a Machine Learning Engineer at Applied Memetic

What is your role at Behavioral Signals?

My role as a Machine Learning Engineer includes developing and improving models that analyze behaviors based on speech and deploying them on a large scale

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

The difference between the controlled academic environment and the real-world problems that arise when developing and releasing models in the wild

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

Learning and applying a new framework or methodology

Who are your role models and mentors?

Nikola Tesla, Hayao Miyazaki, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Efrim Menuck, Emma Goldman

What professional mistakes have you learned most from?

Bad/abstract planning, delaying methodic debugging

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

Making accurate cross-cultural predictions, especially in low resource settings

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

Challenges: Being able to interpret and explain the decisions taken by a model in a way that is understandable by humans. Also, dealing with the ever-increasing need for computing resources. Breakthrough: Hardware-related progress, such as Analog A.I.

What makes you happy?

Travelling to new countries/places, hiking, listening to and playing music

What makes you angry?

Inequality and false risotto  

What makes you dream?

A good book or movie

What makes you get up and moooooove?

The realization that time flies

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

Sarcasm

Can procrastination be useful?

A lot, if you do it right

Post-its OR whiteboards?

Not writing anything and remembering 80% of it

Tea or coffee?

Who would even pick tea?

Food you never get bored eating?

Souvlaki

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

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

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

Meropi Topalidou