Dr. George Samaras is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Cyprus and has also served as the department's Chairman during the period of 2008 - 2010. He received a PhD and M.Sc. in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA, in 1989 and 1985 respectively. He obtained his B.Sc. degree in Mathematics at the University of Athens, Greece (1982). He was previously at IBM Research Triangle Park, USA and taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (adjunct Assistant Professor, 1990-93). He served as the lead architect of IBM's distributed commit architecture (1990-94) and co-authored the final publication of the architecture (IBM Book, SC31-8134-00, September 1994). He also served on IBM's internal international standards committees for issues related to distributed transaction processing (OSI/TP, XOPEN, OMG).
His broad research interests span the areas of Mobile and Wireless Computing, Sensor Networks, Database Systems, Transaction Processing, Commit Protocols and Resource Recovery, Personalization and Context based Systems, WWW Information Retrieval, and Web Computing.
He has published more than 250 articles in conferences and journals and co-authored two books and a number of book chapters. His work on understanding the effect of human cognitive factors on CAPTCHA-related user interactions received the best paper award at the Springer International Conference on Human Factors in Computing and Informatics (SouthCHI 2013), the work on personalizing user authentication tasks based on human cognitive differences received the best paper award nomination at the Springer International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP 2014), the work on personalizing eLearning environments based on cognitive characteristics received the best student paper award at the 5th International Conference on Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-based Systems (AH 2008) and the work on utilizing mobile agents for Web database access has received the best paper award of the 1999 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE99). He also has a number of patents relating to transaction processing technology.
Dr. Samaras is on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Internet Technology and Secured Transactions and has served as guest editor for a number of journals and on program committees of most top conferences and workshops on Database and mobile computing. Between 2001 and 2004, he was the program co-chair for 4 workshops and tracks on databases and mobility. In 2005, he was the General Chair of the International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM). In 2007 he co-chaired the technical program of the ACM Workshop on Data Engineering for Mobile and Wireless Access (MobiDE) and in 2010 the General Chair of the 9th Hellenic Data Management Symposium (HDMS 2010). He is a member of the ACM (Sigmod, Sigmobile), and the IEEE Computer Society.
He has also served as proposal evaluator at a national and international level and he is regularly (since December 1998) invited by the European Commission to serve as an external project evaluator and auditor for the ESPRIT and IST Programs (FP5, FP6 and FP7) in areas related to internet, RFID and Sensor networks, mobile and wireless computing, Grid computing and mobile agents. At the European level he has reviewed and audited more than 120 multimillion-EURO proposals and projects. In addition he served as a technology advisor and consultant at an international and local level in numerous occasions.
He has a long term participation in research projects funded from national and international organizations, including the European Union and the Cyprus Research Foundation (RPF). Specifically he has been participating in a number of IST projects related to mobile, wireless, sensor networks and distributed computing as the scientific coordinator of the Cyprus participation, such as GrowMeUp, Miraculous-Life, SocialRobot, Co-LIVING, IPAC, CONET, mPower, MobiHealth24, MOTIVE, DBGlobe, MEMO, SeLeNe, and has also coordinated a number of RPF funded projects like: PersonaWeb, FireWatch, MELCO, EKPAIDEION, PERSONA, SEMANET, ENDIKTIS, MATHON, DITIS.