About — Nikitas Papadopoulos

My name is Nikitas Papadopoulos. I'm 29, and, as you may have guessed, I'm Greek. I am also French, but I spent my whole childhood in Italy. This odd Mediterranean combination has given me a preference for lively and welcoming places, a heavy hand with olive oil, and the appropriate tastebuds for coffee.

Despite working in AI, my true passion in life is basketball. I've been playing basketball for as long as I can remember, and I hope to continue doing so until I have no cartilage left inside my knees!

I'm naturally curious, love learning new skills and can sometimes spend hours reading about random subjects on Wikipedia.

Background

After finishing high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do in life. I visited a few universities, and upon seeing a cool video about micro-engineering at EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland), I decided to pursue my Bachelor's there. It had a bit of everything engineering-wise: electronics, mechanics, programming... so I thought that I could always decide later!

Later came: I had a lot of fun, spent a year in Madrid, got my Bachelor's, but still no idea about the future. So I chose a Master's in Robotics for the same reason. That's where I started getting interested in AI, more precisely in building real-world applications through Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing.

This time around, I had a lot of fun again, got my degree and a slightly clearer idea of what I wanted to pursue!

How I work

In my experience, the expensive mistakes usually get made before anyone writes any code. I like to spend a long time there, and say what I think the problem is early and loud, so someone can tell me I'm wrong while it's still cheap to start over.

After that it's design, build, explain, and iterate in that order. The explaining matters as much as any of it: a tool nobody understands doesn't get used, however well it works. The best part of the job is watching something I built become part of how a team actually works.

Now

I've recently relocated to Bordeaux and am looking for a new role. If you think you have something interesting for me, want to meet my dog, or just want to watch highlights of Greece's legendary 2000s basketball team, feel free to reach out.

Off the clock

You'll probably find me on a basketball court, walking my hyperactive and far too stubborn sausage dog (Moka), or sweatily kneading pizza dough. Either way, I'm probably late for something, but I swear I'm trying my best!