Emmanouil (Manos) Koukoumidis

To Ph.D. or not to Ph.D.?

Written by Emmanouil Koukoumidis on June 19, 2014.

Several people have been asking me about whether they should do a PhD or not. Sometimes they frame their question in a different way: "If you knew back then what you know now (already a couple years in the software industry), would you do it again?"

If you aspire to become a researcher or a university professor, then PhD is the way to go. If not, then this becomes a very hard question to answer as it depends on what skills you want to grow, and on how many sacrifices you are willing to make…

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SignalGuru: Crowdsourcing with Smartphone Cameras

Written by Emmanouil Koukoumidis on September 4, 2012.

Ubiquitous smartphones are increasingly becoming the dominant platform for collaborative sensing. Smartphones, with their ever richer set of sensors, are being used to enable collaborative driver-assistance services like traffic advisory and road condition monitoring. To enable such services, the smartphones’ GPS, accelerometer and gyro sensors have been widely used. On the contrary, smartphone cameras, despite being very powerful sensors, have largely been neglected. In this paper, we introduce a collaborative sensing platform that exploits the cameras of windshield-mounted smartphones.

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