Marios Papachristou was born in Athens (GR) in 1997 and is currently an undergraduate Electrical Engineering student at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). He has been contributing to open-source and open-hardware projects since 2010, being an ardent open-source fan. He has attended (7-8/2014) the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research Institute for Marine Resources and Island Waters as a researcher, where he had been developing computer vision applications for bioinformatics in a project called TritonFPR. He published his first paper at the age of 16 for developing an open-source 3D Printing-Milling Machine made out of LEGOs, while he remains active by contributing to many projects. He has been maintaining a personal blog and a GitHub account, in which he shares his thoughts as well as his work. Throughout his academic years, he has been trying really hard to acquire a strong educational and practical background whilst he remains at the top and he aspires to gain further insights in research areas like Machine Learning, Algorithms and Complexity, as well as Computer Vision and Robotics utilizing technology for the benefit of the people by conducting research in the future.

Therefore, he has been involved in many projects in the last few years in the University involving the technologies presented below. To start with, he founded a team which together implemented a sign language interpreter wearable glove in order to assist people with hearing disabilities, called SignGlove which received the second prize in ECESCON 9 hackathon. Furthermore, he was part of a team which implemented a smart home that uses machine learning for predicting how a house would operate based on the user’s preferences via computer vision, voice recognition, NLP and convolutional neural networks. He is also an amateur competitive programmer with the last distinction having been ranked, with his team, 48th Worldwide among 3342 teams in the international competition IEEEXtreme 11.0 by IEEE under the name PComplete.
Marios has also been contributing voluntarily as an undergraduate teaching assistant in Discrete Mathematics, Programming Techniques and Introduction to Programming Courses being curated at his School. He is also a member of the TEDxNTUA Organizing Committee responsible for building its website, as a team project, using the Laravel PHP Framework.

In the end, he is also one of the co-founders of a startup, with some friends, called ratle which specializes in cashierless payments; currently in be finnovative acceleration programme and came as an idea after winning crowdhackathon fintech #2 National Competition organized by NBG by implementing a fully working prototype of a cashierless payment shop (i.e. user flow). The project is now being tested on real stores.