Michail Salampasis was born in Germany. He holds a B.Sc. in Informatics (graduation grade 78%) from the Department of Informatics of the Alexander Technological Educational Institute (ATEI) of Thessaloniki in Greece. He accomplished his final degree thesis while he was at the School of Computing at Teesside University in UK as a student participating in the Erasmus student exchange program. The title of his final degree thesis was: “The Inclusion of a Distributed Multi-Agent Problem Solving Sub-model in Object Oriented Analysis and Design”. After his graduation he worked for one year as a software engineer in the development of interactive computer based learning programs.
He has a Ph.D. in Computing from the School of Computing at the University of Sunderland in UK. His PhD research was supported by a full PhD studentship from the Greek State Scholarship Foundation, after succeeding first rank in the relevant Pan-Hellenic exams. His PhD thesis was entitled “An Agent Based Hypermedia Digital Library” and accepted with few minor revisions (external examiner Prof. Wendy Hall). Salampasis was candidate for the best PhD thesis awards (Distinguished PhD Dissertation Competition organised by the British Computer Society) as his institution, with the support of the external examiner, has selected his thesis for submission to the distinguished dissertation scheme. This is a significant acknowledgment for research work of exceptional quality.
His Ph.D. research project followed an interdisciplinary approach in the scientific area of Open Hypermedia Systems (OHSs) which was very active by that time, and in the areas of digital libraries and distributed information retrieval. In the Ph.D. thesis a new method for collection fusion was proposed and systematically evaluated using both system-centred and user-centred methodologies. The new collection fusion method was using hypermedia links to solve the collection fusion problem. The link-based strategy was applicable in dynamic Hypermedia Digital Libraries (HDLs) because it does not require any learning phase nor uses information from remote collections or any exchange of information is required. Additionally, a novel distributed agent-based OHS was presented and systematically evaluated using a large set of user-centered experiments using both quantitative and qualitative methods. The agent-based OHS was used as an underlying platform for designing and developing open, interoperable and extensible HDLs in which multiple information seeking strategies can be integrated.
In addition to his role in academia, Salampasis has been involved in the information technology industry. He worked as the principal designer and chief computer scientist in research and development of the largest digital Greek Encyclopedia for the WWW (www.gnosinet.gr). He has also led a number of multimedia development projects at one of the largest Multimedia and publishing companies in Greece called “Science and Life” (www.encyclopedia.gr).
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I would like to thank prof. Allan Hanbury for hosting me at TUW on a Marie Curie project to develop PerFedPat. Also, Giorgios Kontokotsios, Giannis Paraskeuopoulos, Dimitris Doulamis and numerous undergraduate students from the Information and Electronics Engineering department at the Interenational Hellenic University, for their contribution in developing iPerFedPat. Also Anastasia Giahanou, Pavlos Fafavlios, Yiannis Tzitzikas, Ivan Chorbev for their contribution in integrating tools in PerFedPat and of course the group of prof. Norbert Fuhr developing ezDL at the University of Duisburg (especially Matthias for his patience at our early stages of cloning ezDL).
