Athanasios Nikolakopoulos
Senior Applied Scientist, Amazon Special Projects
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolAthanasios Nikolakopoulos is a Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon Special Projects who blends deep academic rigor with product-focused ML engineering across Large Language Models, Graph ML, and computational biology. With a PhD and postdoctoral work in AI and over nine years of experience, he has architected production Generative AI systems—like SAGE—that now supply attribute values for millions of catalog items and have delivered measurable revenue and customer experience gains. His research record (35+ publications, multiple Best Paper awards, and NSF-funded work) underpins practical inventions such as diversified sampling, zero-shot graph expansion, and adaptive batching that dramatically cut labeling and inference costs. At Amazon he now leads pretraining of large-scale GenAI models for biology, highlighting a rare crossover from recommender systems and graph methods into life-science model pretraining. Known for turning novel graph-based and sampling ideas into scalable production wins, he routinely operates at the intersection of foundational research and high-impact engineering.
9 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Post Doc Artificial Intelligence, Post Doc Artificial Intelligence at University of MinnesotaDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computer Science and Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Computer Science and Engineering at University of Patras
Greek, English
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
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Github Skills (29)
pytorch9
inference9
recall9
cuda9
gpt8
transformer8
slim8
compression8
collaborative-filtering8
matrix-factorization8
llama8
llm8
amd8
openai8
recommendation-engine8
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
nikolakopoulos/EigenRec
Nov 2016 - Jul 2019
Implementations of the EigenRec algorithm
Contributions:35 commits, 32 pushes, 2 branches in 2 years 7 months
nikolakopoulos/Personalized-Diffusions
Jul 2019 - Sep 2019
Personalized Item Exploration Processes for Recommendation
Contributions:50 commits, 4 PRs, 16 pushes in 1 month
recommendationitempersonalized
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