Hello, stranger

Welcome to my personal website.

Who am I?

My name is Vasilis Georgitzikis, but since this is hard even for Greeks to pronounce, most people just call me Tzikis. Feel free to do so too. 👍

Ok, but really, who am I?

I'm a Computer Engineer, open source geek, who turned over to the dark side and became an entrepreneur.

In a past life, I worked on freelance web development with technologies such as Joomla, Symfony, jQuery, React, etc. I have explored various technologies such as iPhone app development, CUDA programming, embedded systems development, and IoT applications. I also worked in systems administration, although it is not my primary area of expertise.

Perhaps more importantly, I was a Researcher for the EU for a couple of years (while still a university student), with quite a few publications on what would later be called Internet of Things.

During my university studies, I had the opportunity to also work as a researcher for the European Union for two years. Throughout that time, I contributed to several publications that anticipated and explored what would later be called Internet of Things.

What are you up to now?

More recently, I've transitioned to tech entrepreneurship, starting with my first startup, codebender, a pioneering Cloud-based Arduino IDE. We launched in 2012, raised $1M of funding, which was a remarkable achievement for a Greek startup during that period. As part of a strategic acquisition in 2017, codebender was sold to Codeanywhere, a fellow Cloud IDE provider.

Following that, I assumed the role of Special Projects Lead at Resin.io (now Balena), where I oversaw a diverse range of hardware-related initiatives.

This encompassed responsibilities such as project management, product design, hardware evaluation, supply management, and direct reporting to the CEO. In essence, I embraced a multifaceted role, implying a versatile skill set that covered various domains, truly being a jack of all trades (and master of none?).

Subsequently, I joined forces with a few friends to establish an IoT startup called Spanner CI. Unfortunately, we had to cease operations and shut down the company due to lack of funding.

During the pandemic, I switched gears and ventured into mechanical engineering. I co-authored two patents for LESS, an innovative patented mechanism that drastically improves Internal Combustion Engines (ICEs), Compressors and Pumps. This led to the formation of LESS Engineering, a startup aimed at bringing this technology to the market.

Currently, I am CTO of Carbon Origins, a Techstars startup that aims to make robots commonplace by giving them human-level intelligence through VR teleoperation and AI training.

That's (not) all, folks

That was the basic gist. If you have time to kill, keep reading for some extra random info.

Miscellaneous Info

As a university student, I was one of the co-founders and coordinators of P-Space, the first Greek hackerspace - in Patras, Greece.

We created several Open Source Projects, including the construction of one of Greece's earliest 3D printers. Our accomplishments even garnered attention from Greek national television, where we made multiple appearances. Needless to say, they were some of the best days (well, nights) of my life.

Prior to that, I was an active member of the Patras Linux Users Group, where I regularly delivered presentations on various Open Source technologies. I was also lucky to have the opportunity to contribute articles to national Linux publications, including Linux Format and Linux Inside.

Lastly, I have had the privilege of speaking at numerous conferences, too many to keep track of, ranging from renowned events like FOSDEM and FOSSCOMM (which I also co-organized in 2011), to conducting workshops at prestigious institutions like MIT, and mentoring for Mozilla and Facebook.

And I love teaching, so hit me up if you want me to talk somewhere!

Open Source Contributions

As an Open Source enthusiast, I've created and contributed to a list of open source projects. Here's a rough list:

• Lead Developer of codebender, an award-winning open-source web platform for embedded software development (with an emphasis on Arduino) and collaborating.
• Father of the WebSerial internet standard. While at codebender, I started the discussion and the design process for what would eventually become the WebSerial standard.
• Developed Capster, a caps lock status notification application for OS X. Now part of Growl.
• Growl - Part of The Growl Team since September 2011, working primarily on Hardware Growler.
• GNTP Arduino, an Arduino implementation of the Growl Notification Transport Protocol.
• Ported the MD5 hash algorithm to Arduino - Arduino MD5.
• Core developer of home-automation, a home automation lib for Arduino using XBee for 802.15.4.
• Co-developer of mksense, a heterogenous 802.15.4 network library that takes care of incompatibilities in the 802.15.4 protocol between TelosB, iSense, SunSPOT, and XBee (Arduino).
• Worked on Pallet, a GUI front-end for MacPorts, as part of GSoC 2010.
• astyle.js - A transcompilation in Javascript of the popular Astyle code beautifier (written in C).
• Funnel I/O - Patched some bugs in the FIOXBeeConfigTool.
• Fedora Project - Design of the 2008 official Greek Fedora Website (fedoraproject.gr).

Translations:

• Arduino - Translated the Arduino IDE to Greek
• Adium - Translated version 1.4-1.4.3 to Greek
• Fedora Project - Translation for Fedora project in 2008
• YamiPod (Yet another manager for iPod) - Translated to Greek
• Notational Velocity - Translated to Greek
• Sparkle.framework - Translated to Greek

Academic Work

You can always find an up-to-date list on ResearchGate.

Publications

Design, Development and Evaluation of a Chess Game in a Ubiquitous Environment Vasileios Georgitzikis, Christos Koninis, Ioannis Chatzigianakis EUREKA! 2010 Conference, October 14-15, Patras, Greece'

Distributed Self-organized Societies of Tiny Artefacts: Design & Implementation Contributing Author, Book on FRONTS software, Published by PerAda, 2011

Building a Platform-Agnostic Wireless Network of Interconnected Smart Objects Orestis Akribopoulos, Vasileios Georgitzikis, Anastasia Protopapa, Ioannis Chatzigiannakis 15th Panhellenic Conference on Informatics (PCI), 2011

Deployment and Evaluation of a 802.15.4 Heterogeneous Network Orestis Akribopoulos, Vasileios Georgitzikis, Christos Koninis, Ioannis Papavasileiou, Ioannis Chatzigiannakis Technical Report in ACM Computing Research Repository, arXiv:1102.0058v2, February, 2011.

Controlling Physical Objects via the Internet using the Arduino Platform over 802.15.4 Networks Vasileios Georgitzikis, Orestis Akribopoulos, Ioannis Chatzigiannakis IEEE Latin America Transactions - Volume: 10, Issue: 3. April 2012

Employing Internet of Things Technologies for Building Automation Dimitrios Amaxilatis, Vasileios Georgitzikis, Dimitrios Giannakopoulos, Ioannis Chatzigiannakis ETFA 2012, Poland, 2012.

Making P-Space Smart: Integrating IoT Technologies in a Multi-office Environment O.Akribopoulos, D.Amaxilatis, V.Georgitzikis, M.Logaras, V.Keramidas,
 K.Kontodimas, E.Lagoudianakis, N.Nikoloutsakos, V.Papoutsakis, I.Prevezanos,
 G.Pyrgeris, S.Tsampas, V.Voutsas, I.Chatzigiannakis

Mobilware, 2012 Using Codebender and Arduino in Science and Education Dimitrios Amaxilatis, Vasileios Georgitzikis Contributing Author, System-Level Design Methodologies for Telecommunication, Springer International Publishing, 2014

Conferences

IEEE Gold Athena Summer School (2011) - Presented mkSense, a network stack for enabling cross- platform 802.15.4 networks, and how to use Arduino and XBee modules for wireless communication.

IEEE Gold - Athena Summer School (2012) - Presented Arduino-related Wireless Sensor Networks and PMH, a home automation system I co-developed in Research Unit 1 of CTI & Press “Diofantus”.

IEEE DAY 2012 - IEEE T.E.I. of Messolonghi Student Branch (Oct 10 - 2012) - Presented the Arduino platform, our contributions to the Arduino code, the codebender project, and hosted a workshop on Arduino development.

1st IEEE-AESS Conference on Space and Satellite Telecommunications (Oct 2-5 2012) - Participating Author and Acknowledged in the paper (and accompanying talk) “Cryptographic Hardware & Embedded Systems for Communications” by N. Sklavos.


Bonus

Wow, you made it this far! Here's a wacky old photo of me for your amusement.