Transitioning between two different cultures and professional roles—from working at a university in Greece to joining the National Research Council of Italy—presented Theofanis Raptis with several valuable lessons, including an understanding of what he calls an intellectual “fermentation” process.
Triggered by internationalization, bilateral cooperation, and cross-discipline collaborations, this fermentation included the dynamic exchange and blending of ideas across disciplines and cultures, leading to broader perspectives and creative drive.
It is, in a sense, a roadmap of how Raptis executes much of his groundbreaking research.
Raptis is one of Computing’s Top 30 Early Career Professionals.
In the Q&A that follows, he discusses his experiences with cultural transition and how it impacted his work. He also describes
How optimizing the configuration of Apache Kafka clusters in the EU’s MARVEL project enables scalable, dependable data exchange across distributed producers and consumers
His active involvement in P2P crowd charging work as part of the StandICT.eu effort to amplify Europe’s impact on global ICT standards—and how this project led to him serving as an StandICT.eu mentor
How his paper on industry data management took a multidisciplinary approach that bridged gaps between the traditionally siloed fields of communications/networking and industrial manufacturing/automation
His early work on the Control Cube prototype, a versatile hardware/software device to integrate conventional appliances and legacy systems into the IoT
Your work on the MARVEL project led to the HDD outcome being featured in the EU Innovation Radar. Can you elaborate on this outcome and its significance for smart city environments?
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