5G Ventures announces the Advisory Board Members
Seven renowned professionals with distinguished careers in entrepreneurship, research and development, innovation, high technology, and management, are the Advisory Board members of 5G Ventures, the company that manages Phaistos Investment Fund.
The Advisory Board members are:
- Jim Brisimitzis
- Bill Karnazes
- Ioannis Katsavounidis
- Alex Papaspyridis
- Constantinos Polychronopoulos
- Michalis Tzannes
- Harris Tsavdaris
The Advisory Board submits recommendations to the Board of Directors and the Investment Committee of 5G Ventures. The establishment of the Advisory Board is part of the preparation of 5G Ventures for the launch of Phaistos in the current year. Brief resumes of the Advisory Board members are available at the Appendix.
Appendix
Brief resumes of the Advisory Board members
Jim Brisimitzis
5G Open Innovation Lab, Seattle
Jim has over 20 years of enterprise, channel, and startup experience through companies such as Bell Canada, Nortel Networks, PeopleSoft, Oracle and over 13 years at Microsoft. Jim is the Founder of the 5G Open Innovation Lab in Seattle. The Lab is a community of innovators, platforms, and industry focused on discovering, accelerating, and promoting future 5G inspired used cases and innovation. Prior to launching the Lab Jim was a Managing Partner for Quake Capital leading their early efforts to establish a presence in the ecosystem. Jim was also the General Manager of the Microsoft for Startups program in the United States and Canada. His team was responsible for startup engagements partnering with leading North American startup accelerators/incubators.
Together with these partners Jim’s team engaged over 2,800 startups actively running on Azure through programs such as the Customer Access Program (CAP), technical enablement, and events to help startups accelerate their business. Prior to launching the Microsoft for Startups program. Jim led operations for Microsoft Ventures globally in addition to creating and launching their “HiPo” program; an exclusive engagement for Startups with significant market potential.
Bill Karnazes
Qualcomm, San Diego CA
Bill Karnazes is Vice President of Global Business Operations for Qualcomm Incorporated. He is responsible for Global Business Operations activities within Qualcomm’s semiconductor business unit. Managing global sales operations, customer forecasting, demand management, engineering program management and overall business operations activities for multi-billion annual revenue business. He has held several executive-level positions at Qualcomm over the last 24 years and has extensive experience in business and partner development with strong financial acumen. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from San Diego State University and executive project/portfolio management certificates from Stanford University and the University of San Diego.
Ioannis Katsavounidis
Facebook, Menlo Park CA
Ioannis Katsavounidis is currently Research Scientist at Facebook’s Video Infrastructure team. He worked with Netflix as a Senior Research Scientist in 2015-2018. He is a co-inventor of VMAF, Netflix’s video quality metric, and the inventor of Dynamic Optimizer, Netflix’s per-shot perceptual optimization framework, both of which have been awarded a technical Emmy in 2021. From 2008 to 2015 he was an associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Thessaly in Volos, Greece. He has been co-founder and CTO of Cidana, a startup mobile multimedia software company with its main R&D office in Shanghai, China, while he was Director of Software with InterVideo in Fremont, CA, in 2000-2007, helping the company to go public in 2003. He worked as an engineer for Caltech’s Physics department, as part of the MACRO experiment, from 1996 to 2000. He has over 150 publications including over 40 patents. His research interests are in video compression, quality assessment and quality optimization. He is a co-chair at VQEG (Video Quality Experts Group) and co-chair at the Alliance of Open Media (AOM) software implementation working group (SIWG).
Alex Papaspyridis
Microsoft, Singapore
Alexandros Papaspyridis is Industry Director for the Asia Pacific Japan timezone in Microsoft, which spans Asia Pacific, Australia, Greater China Region, India and Japan. Prior to Microsoft he has worked in Information Technology and telecom companies and has founded two startups. He is a member of the Advisory Boards at EcoCommons Australia; at the Centre on AI Technology for Humankind at the National University of Singapore Business School; and at the Depths of Computing and Electrical Engineering Imperial College. He holds a PhD in Electronics Engineering, a Master’s in Management and a Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering from Imperial College, London. He also holds the Microsoft Professional Program certificate in Artificial Intelligence.
Constantinos Polychronopoulos
Juniper, Sunnyvale CA
Constantinos Polychronopoulos is VP of Technology, 5G & Telco Cloud, at Juniper Networks responsible for 5G products and strategy. Prior to Juniper, he has been VP and CTO of Telco & Edge Computing at VMware, leading the development of VMware’s product and technology strategy in 4G & 5G markets and VP & CTO of Cloud Networking at Citrix, following the acquisition of Bytemobile. As Founder of Bytemobile he led the development of innovative products for web, streaming video and transport protocol optimization for 3G and 4G/LTE that were deployed in more than 160 network operators worldwide. He also established the Bytemobile European Development Center in Patra, Greece, employing over 100 software developers. He has published more than 160 research papers, chaired numerous international conferences, and has more than 35 issued and pending patents. He was a professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois for more than 20 years, while in the year 1998 he received the Bodosakis Award.
Michalis Tzannes
Technology Entrepreneur, Greater Boston
Michael Tzannes is an angel investor who has worked with technology companies that improve the way people process and share information. Aware Inc. in Bedford MA, which went public on Nasdaq in 1996 and where he served as CEO for over a decade, pioneered the development and licensing of high-speed DSL technology. Accusonus, with offices in Athens and Patras, Greece and which he co-founded in 2015, uses artificial intelligence in software products to democratize the creation of audio and video content. Michael has written patents covering DSL communications, WiFi and transform-based audio processing. He is on the Advisory Boards at the EE department at Tufts University and the Hellenic Innovation Network. Michael has a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Tufts University, a Master’s Degree in Computer, Information and Control Engineering from the University of Michigan and a Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the University of Patras, Greece where he was valedictorian. He was awarded the Argo Network Award for Innovation in 2020.
Harry Tsavdaris
Microsoft, Athens
Harry Tsavdaris has extensive experience in the whole spectrum of government IT systems government data centres consolidation, transformation and operation and government interoperability frameworks. He holds the National Technology Officer position in Microsoft Greece, Cyprus, and Malta acting as a technology ambassador and promoting trust and confidence in the next-generation technologies of the Public Sector and Regulated industries (Financial Services and Health). He has worked as the Secretary-General for Information Systems in the Greek Ministry of Finance responsible for the operation, support and implementation of all IT Systems in the Ministry of Finance and most of the core systems of the Greek Government, definition of the IT Strategy of the Ministry of Finance and of the IT Strategy of the Greek Government. He graduated from the Electrical and Computer Engineering School of the National Technical University of Athens and holds a PhD in Decision Support Systems.
