General Information

My name is George Valkanas and I am a Senior Research Engineer at Detectica, in NY. Our focus is to build compliance tools that are powered by data mining techniques. I specifically work on text and graph mining, coupled with a lot of algorithmic techniques and engineering to make our systems perform efficiently and effectively.

Before that, I was a PostDoc at Stevens Institute of Technology, in Hoboken, NJ, working with Prof. Theodoros Lappas on the Provost's Digital Learning Ignition Grant Program (DLIGP). I was also an adjunct instructor for the Business School, teaching a graduate course on Web Mining.

I obtained my BSc from the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications (DIT), University of Athens (UoA), Greece in 2007 and my MSc from the Department of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in 2009. I completed my PhD in 2014 at the DIT, UoA, titled Mining and Managing User-Generated Content and Preferences. My advisor was Prof. Dimitrios Gunopulos, co-advised by Prof. Yannis Ioannidis and Associate Prof. Stathes Hadjiefthymiades. My PhD research was funded by an "Heraclitus II" scholarship.

My main research interests are Web / Text Mining, Information Extraction and Retrieval and Databases (with a high degree of preference on multidimensional data). I am also interested in Pervasive computing and algorithmic issues in Sensor Networks and in the creation of applications combining concepts and techniques from the aforementioned areas.

During my studies, I was (and still am) a member of the Knowledge Discovery in Databases Laboratory (KDDLab) and of the Pervasive Computing Research Group (P-Comp).

My CV is available here. Additional info from my LinkedIn profile and DBLP Entry.