Projects

In this section I gothered some worth mentioning project assignments that I have completed during my studies:

User Research Intern

Digital Transformation, Sappi Europe, Brussels, Belgium
February - July 2021

Focused on the evaluation of Sappi's B2B e-commerce platform's usability and user experience (UX). During my 6-month internship at Sappi, I advanced my skills in:

Understanding and deciding on relevant user research methods for e-commerce sites
Organizing, conducting, reporting and presenting user research
Presenting technical information in a multi-disciplinary, multi-national audience.
Designing graphical elements for digital and physical assets/products.
Structuring and co-authoring an academic publication in the field of human-computer interaction:

Vassilis-Javed Khan, Kouris Kalligas, Damianos Dumi Sigalas, and Christos Sintoris. 2022. A B2C Bias for the B2B World: A Case Study of Employees’ and Customers’ UX of a B2B e-commerce Site.
To-be presented at CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (CHI ’22 Extended Abstracts), New Orleans, USA. ACM. (Accepted)

3D Data Visualization Project

Summer 2021, Riga Technical University, Riga, Latvia

This summer school consisted of 3 weeks of learning a variety of topics, from theory of animation to practical skills such as Blender to create a short animation. Being a Computer Engineering student, I utilized my programming skills to program Blender with Python and create an informative animation, illustrating vaccination data available for the EU region at the time.

CoroRob: A hand sanitizing Robot

Summer 2020, Riga Technical University, Riga, Latvia

This summer school explored the process of designing an interactive robot from the conception of the idea to the creation of a tangible, functional device. In response to the global pandemic, we designed a robotic arm that delivered hand sanitizer to people passing nearby.

View gallery

AUTH's website usability evaluation

WS 2019-20, Interactive Technologies, HCI Lab, ECE UPatras

The scope of the project was to evaluate the usability of the website of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH), the second biggest university of Greece. In the beginning of the project we visited the city of Thessaloniki and the university in order to study the field of the product and get in touch with its actual users. For the evaluation of the product we designed and conducted different evaluation methods and experiments both in the real world as well as in the HCI Labarotory. Based on the results of the evaluation we came up with a number of redesign proposals which aim to improve the usability of the product while requiring a reasonable amount of implementation effort. Those proposals were evaluated as well with users in the lab.

Download Report (in Greek)

Parallelazation of Linear Algebra operations on GPUs using CUDA

WS 2018-19, High Performance Programming, HPC Lab, CEID UPatras

The scope of this project was to develop a custom implementation for three common linear algebra computational kernels:

2D Convolution
Matrix-Vector multiplication
Matrix Covariance

Keeping performance and accuracy in mind, we compared the results of our custom implementation with the results of CUDA's built in linear algebra package cuBLAS as well as with open source alternatives like openBLAS and kblas-gpu. In terms of hardware, we ran our software both at the machines available at the HPC Lab as well as at the cloud using the GPUs compute engine environment provided by Google Cloud Platform.

View source and report

Parallelazation of Neurons' Simulation software using OpenMP

SS 2017-18, Parallel Processing, HPC Lab, CEID UPatras

The main goal of the project was to parallelize a serial edition of the Leaky Integrate-and-Fire model which is a widely used model for biological neurons simullations. We compared the performance of different mathematical libraries, like BLAS and Intel MKL for the implementation of linear algebra operations .