Keynote talks

Diomidis Spinellis is a Professor and Head of the Department of Management Science and Technology of the Athens University of Economics and Business, director of the Business Analytics Laboratory (BALab), and Editor-in-chief of IEEE Software journal. He has contributed on the development of FreeBSD and various open-source tools and libraries, and is a (four-time) winner of the International Obfuscated C Contest. Spinellis has also authored a series of books related to software development and code quality, two of which have been awarded with the Software Development Productivity Award. His research interests include programming tools and techniques, big data analysis and cloud computing, as well as systems security. For more information you may visit his personal web page.

On his talk, Mr. Spinellis will present the development of the UNIX Operating System architecture since 1970. UNIX has had a profound influence on the development of Operating Systems, especially open-source ones, since both Linux and BSD, among others, are based on its architecture. Based on restored source-code and manuals from the first editions of UNIX inside Bell Labs, until recent FreeBSD releases, we’ll examine the most significant milestones of its development, and its evolution rate over the years. Through this process we’ll also derive useful lessons on software development in general.

Alexios Zavras is the Senior Open Source Compliance Engineer at Intel Corp. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science, with studies in National Technical University of Athens and University of Wisconsin – Madison. His experience with FOSS dates back to 1983 before GNU was founded and the terms “free software” or “open source” were invented. He is an active member on many FOSS communities and has an equally extensive professional experience through his many years of work using FOSS, both as a freelancer and also as a staff member on various companies and organizations in Greece and abroad.

On his talk Alexios will discuss the job opportunities that arise through FOSS. Nowadays, working with FOSS of any form provides a continuously growing competitive advantage when looking for a job. One of the main aspects of this trend is that it’s not limited to the strict scope of software engineering but also covers other areas of expertise such as graphic design, technical documentation writing, legal services related to licensing etc. Based on his extensive experience and with specific examples, Mr. Zavras will present lots of different activities and job paths available to those who dare to follow them…

Manolis Katevenis is a professor at the Computer Science Department of the University of Crete, and one of its founders, after returning to Greece from Stanford University in USA where he served as Assistant Professor. He is also the Head of the Computer Architecture and VLSI (CARV) Laboratory of FORTH. Widely known as the main designer of the RISC-II processor (precursor of SPARC) at U.C. Berkeley, he has received various awards such as the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award in 1984 and the “Stelios Pichoridis” Award in 2015 for Outstanding University Teaching. He is a founding member of HiPEAC and a member of Academia Europaea. Apart from his academic career, Katevenis has also worked as a consultant for companies such as DEC and AMD, where he contributed on the design of Am29000 in 1984, arguably one of the most popular RISC processors of its time and forerunner of K5/K6. In addition to his work on processor architectures, his research interests include high-speed network and packet switching architectures, scalable multi-core and low-power systems, VLSI systems, and more. For more information you may visit his personal web page.

In his talk, Mr. Katevenis will present the characteristics of the RISC architecture, the development history of RISC-II, the evolution of RISC-based processors, and the European actions, since the early 10’s, for energy-efficient Datacenters and Supercomputers. He will also introduce us to the RISC-V architecture, an open architecture, with participation from large tech companies, research centers (among which FORTH as well), and volunteers, that aims to be the next step in processor development. RISC-based processors have considerable advantages and are continuously gaining popularity, from mobile phones and networking equipment to large supercomputers such as Sunway TaihuLight, the world’s fastest supercomputer until 2018.

Pierros Papadeas works at the Mozilla Foundation as a Community Architect since 2007, as an Open Innovation Strategist since 2014, and has also been elected as Chair of the Fedora Ambassadors Steering Committee in 2010-11. With his great experience in managing open source projects and communities, he co-founded the first Greek Hackerspace, and Libre Space Foundation. His passion with space exploration led him to join the team behind SatNOGS, a network of satellite ground stations, built with open source technologies. Afterwards as a member of Libre Space Foundation he was the Project Manager of the UPSat project, the first satellite based on open source technologies worldwide and also the first to be fully built in Greece.

In his talk, Pierros will be covering the short history of Libre Space Foundation, the team’s previous experience on upstream and midstream space projects, how they got involved in UPSat, the status of the project when they got involved, the design, construction, verification, testing and delivery processes. He will also be covering current status and operations, contribution opportunities and thoughts about next open source projects in space. During the presentation we will be focusing also on the challenges and struggles associated with open source and space industry.