Nicholas S. Samaras (Senior Member, IEEE) http://www.cs.teilar.gr/personen/nsamaras, is currently a Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Director of the Network Engineering Division at TEI of Thessaly. He has extensive experience in industry and academia both in national and international context. He has presented numerous papers in world respected International Conferences and has authored several articles published in international referee journals and book chapters.

Dr. Samaras has designed, developed, implemented and commissioned various distributed control and automation systems, applied to a variety of processing applications, worldwide. He has been an Adjunct Faculty member with both the Department of Telecommunications and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. He has also been a Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Engineering at the Southern Denmark Syddansk University, in Odense, Denmark, the Faculty of Science and Engineering at San Jorge University, in Zaragoza, Spain and at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Wroclaw University, in Wroclaw, Poland. Dr. Samaras has taught for several years as a ΠΔ 407/80 at the Departments of Crop Production and Agricultural Environment, and Mechanical Engineering, at the University of Thessaly. 

He has undertaken leadership positions both in industry and academia. In Academia, he has served as Department Head as well as Director of the Network Engineering Division at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, at TEI of Thessaly. In addition, he served as Award Leader of the Post Graduate Program in Computer Science, at Staffordshire University. In industry, he was a Lead Engineer, of the High Speed Process Regulators and Drives Group at Westinghouse, in Pittsburgh, USA, and Group Leader of the Research and Design Automation Division at Danieli United Engineering, in Pittsburgh, USA. 

Dr. Samaras has been the coordinator of funded research projects and has been a partner of a number of other projects. He was a recipient of the IEEE Industry Applications Society Prize Paper Award in 1998 and he is awarded various Certificates of Appreciation by IEEE. He is Associate Editor of the European Scientific Journal. In 2000 he was granted a patent by the US Patent Office titled “Optimized temperature trajectory tracking of Runout Table (ROT) cooling process.” Dr. Samaras has been Program/Steering Committee Member and Session Chair at numerous International Conferences and he is a Paper Reviewer for various International Conferences and Journals.