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My name is Costas Zarifis, I was born and raised in Maroussi, Athens.

I am a Ph.D. student studying Computer Science in the Database Group at UC San Diego under the supervision of Yannis Papakonstantinou. I completed my undergrad Diploma (5 year degree) at the Electronic and Computer Engineering Dept (ECE) at the Technical University of Crete.

Being a young, energetic, CS grad student, I enjoy being amidst problems, brainstorming for a solution and I feel even more fulfilled when I provide it.

My main Ph.D. research project is FORWARD. FORWARD is a web application framework that enables declarative specification of visualization-rich applications. It provides automatic incremental rendering capabilities, thus facilitating the creation and maintenance of live visualizations, whenever the underlying data change, without compromising developer friendliness.

My Undergraduate Thesis implementation combined areas of Mobile Applications, Web Services & Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). You can have a look at the available demo videos by following this link.

Research Interests


During these years at TUC and UC San Diego I had the opportunity to work on various fields, such as Telecommunications, Electronics, Computer Science and Architecture. What truly caught my attention, though, was undoubtedly Computer Science & Software Engineering.

Dodging problems, burning the midnight oil coding and looking for solutions to problems can only be surpassed by my never-ending need to optimize my applications and of course by the fact that people use these applications into their everyday lives.

While I was truly fascinated by my frequent interaction with several challenging design and computing applications, more recently I have been more intrigued by the potential to tackle interesting research topics in the field of software engineering.

Having said that, my research interests lie in the areas of:

  • Software Engineering
  • Web and Mobile Architectures, Applications, and Services
  • Wireless Sensor Networks
  • Database Systems & Big Data Management Systems
Furthermore, I am always in a constant need to either additionally expand something well-known and familiar or to search for something completely new and exciting!

For more information about me you can check my Selected Work or download my Curriculum Vitae.

Personal Interests


I like to preserve an active attitude towards everything I do - and the same applies to my leasure time activities. These activities include, Traveling, Snowboarding, Longboarding, Running, Kick-Boxing and Swimming

In addition, when I want to take some time off and relax, I like playing Table & Video Games, Listening to music and of course, since I am a people person, I particularly enjoy the above mentioned activities with the company of my friends.

Contact Info

e-mail:

zarifis AT cs.ucsd.edu:

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