The Unknown Known: Lazaros Zervos

Welcome to my PRACE Summer of HPC blog.

Hello reader (or bot 😁),

As you probably understood from the title, my name is Lazaros Zervos. I am 23 years old and I was born and raised in Athens, Greece. I recently received my B.Sc. degree from National and Kapodistrian University of Athens with major in Computer Science and I’m also starting my M.Sc. studies in October.

The relation between programming and me began back in 2015. While in high school I was very passionate about Math, but was never introduced to the magic of coding. After studying for the university entrance exams which included a course called “Application Development in Programming Environment”, I knew that Computer Science was my thing.

Then, it was in the 3^rd year of my Bachelor’s that I discovered Artificial Intelligence. It combined my 2 interests, Computer Science and Mathematics in a unique way. So here I am, working on a NLP project in the frame of SoHPC program.

Get to know more about me

Since I was young, I was very active both in my “professional” life and outside of it. I like all kinds of sport: Football, Basketball, Tennis, Martial arts, etc. I also play Chess at an amateur but still very good level. I can say with certainty that those hobbies which may seem unimportant for someone, for me they have shaped up at some degree my personality.

My team’s project

During the summer I will work on the Cross-Lingual Transfer learning for biomedical texts project, which is organized and mentored by the Text Mining Unit of Barcelona Supercomputing Center. I will have the pleasure to work on this very interesting project, not alone, but with my teammate Aslihan Uysal, or as we call her Asli.

Nevertheless, a very important aspect of the project is the use of Supercomputers. Model Training in Machine Learning is a data-intensive computing job, so there is a need for High Performance Computing power to have an efficient result in short time. Among others, we’ll have the opportunity to work with one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, MareNostrum.

You can find out more about it in the video below and if you’re more interested you can also take a virtual tour or even an actual visit should you’re sometime in Barcelona.

Conclusion

It’s a great chance for everyone interested in Natural Language Processing to study the results and the work done on the project. Therefore, comment below and keep in touch with the blog to stay up-to-date as new posts are coming in the following weeks.