News Story

Nikos Story: Developing KMi PhD Research into a Commercial Product

Enrico Motta, Wednesday 24 Apr 2019

Nikolaos (“Nikos”) Nanas completed his PhD in Artificial Intelligence (AI) at KMi in 2004. His research focused on Adaptive Information Filtering and its application to content personalisation. Inspired by the biological immune system, he developed an AI model (that he called “Nootropia") capable of learning and continuously adapting to an individual’s multiple and evolving interests. In 2006, he returned to Greece, taking up a research position at the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH) at Volos while also teaching Artificial Intelligence and Web Technologies at the University of Thessaly.

In 2011, Nikos became an entrepreneur and co-founded NOOWIT, a startup dedicated to the creation of intelligent online magazines able to adapt to the interests of each individual user. Utilizing Nootropia as NOOWIT’s AI core, Nikos and his colleagues devised a unique layout engine, able to adapt each page of the magazine to the personal interests of the individual reader.

In 2017, Nikolaos and his team were acquired by Atypon to apply their technologies and insights to the domain of academic publishing. Two years later they released a new product in private beta, SCITRUS. SCITRUS is a personalised publication aggregator that aims to help researchers and practitioners stay on top of developments in their fields of interest. SCITRUS aggregates all relevant publications and news and filters them according to the researcher’s specific interests to produce a personalised feed of academic content. Initial user studies have produced positive feedback and confirmed the value of this approach to content personalization.

From the initial creation of Nootropia, to the entrepreneurial leadership of NOOWIT, to the product development of SCITRUS, Nikos’ trajectory describes a great success story and a nice example of how leading-edge PhD research eventually gets deployed in commercial products.

If you are interested in trying SCITRUS, use the invitation link below to get access to the private beta.

https://www.scitrus.com/splash/?invitationToken=9568fde0-2617-11e9-aacc-ad37fd3cdebc