Solon P. Pissis, Ph.D

Background

I read Computer Science at the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the University of Athens (2003-2007) before completing my M.Sc in High-Performance Computing at the University of Edinburgh (2007-2008). I obtained my Ph.D in Computer Science from King's College London (2008-2012). I also hold a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice in Higher Education from King's College London (2015-2016).

I was a Research Associate in the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida and a Visiting Scientist in the Scientific Computing group at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (2012-2013). I was appointed Lecturer (2013) and then Senior Lecturer (2018) in Computer Science in the Department of Informatics at King's College London. In 2019 I joined CWI, where I am Senior Researcher in the Networks & Optimization group leading the Algorithms and Data Structures for Sequence Analysis team. In 2020, I also joined the Department of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit as (part-time) Associate Professor.

Current Research

My area of research within computer science is algorithms and data structures. Research topics I am interested in include algorithms and data structures on strings and graphs for pattern matching, indexing, comparison, and finding regularities. Applications thereof I am interested in include data mining, bioinformatics, data compression, and information retrieval. In particular, I am interested in applications when there is a very good theoretical reason.

Professional Service

• I am organizing ALGO 2023 at CWI in Amsterdam.
• I am co-chairing (with Jan Holub) the programme committee of PSC 2023 to be held at the Czech Technical University in Prague.
• I am on the programme committee of WABI 2023.
• I am co-chairing (with Rezaul A. Chowdhury) the programme committee of ALENEX 2024 to be held at Alexandria, Virginia, U.S.
• I was on the programme committee of ISAAC 2022, SPIRE 2022, WABI 2022, CPM 2022, CiE 2022, SPIRE 2021, WABI 2021, ALENEX 2021, SOFSEM 2021, WALCOM 2021, CPM 2020, FUN 2020, ECCB 2020, WABI 2020, SPIRE 2020, WALCOM 2020, CPM 2019 (co-chair), SPIRE 2019, IWOCA 2019, WABI 2018, WALCOM 2018, IWOCA 2018, SEA 2017 (co-chair), IWOCA 2017, SPIRE 2017, CPM 2016, IWOCA 2016, SPIRE 2015, IWOCA 2015, IWOCA 2014, IWOCA 2013.

Latest Research Outputs

• Lorraine A.K. Ayad, Grigorios Loukides, Solon P. Pissis: Text Indexing for Long Patterns: Anchors are All you Need. Proc. VLDB Endow. 2023 (accepted)
• Huiping Chen, Grigorios Loukides, Robert Gwadera, Solon P. Pissis: Heavy Nodes in a Small Neighborhood: Algorithms and Applications. SDM 2023 [doi]
• Victoria R. Carr, Solon P. Pissis, Peter Mullany, Saeed Shoaie, David Gomez-Cabrero, and David L. Moyes: Palidis: fast discovery of novel insertion sequences. Microbial Genomics (2023) [doi]
• Grigorios Loukides, Solon P. Pissis, Michelle Sweering: Bidirectional String Anchors for Improved Text Indexing and Top-K Similarity Search. IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. (2023) [doi]
• Haodi Zhong, Grigorios Loukides, Alessio Conte, Solon P. Pissis: Jaccard Median for Ego-network Segmentation. ICDM 2022 [doi]

Ph.D Supervision

I am currently supervising Hilde Verbeek, Esteban Gabory and Michelle Sweering.
I was the lead supervisor of Lorraine Ayad (2019), Chang Liu (2019), and Ahmad Retha (2018).