George was born in Athens, Greece but was raised all over Greece due to very frequent moving. As a child, he was lucky enough to have a mother buying him a lot of books and a father providing him with a lot of things to take apart. Thus, it was inevitable for him to end up in an engineering school. The only hard part was choosing among aerospace/mechanical and electrical, cogs vs cables. Cables prevailed and he received with excellence his diploma degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Technical University of Crete, Greece in 2016, where (and when) he continued his studies towards pursuing a PhD, which he successfully defended in December 2020.

His PhD offered methods for ultra-low-power, ultra-low-complexity and ultra-low-cost wireless communication by recycling radio waves. He built batteryless wireless sensor nodes which can "transmit" a sensor's information by modulating the latter on top of pre-existing (ambient) FM radio signals. Said information can then be recovered by any conventional FM radio receiver. His PhD also offered novel, digital modulation schemes for ambient backscatter, ultra-low-complexity backscatter radio-based beamforming and Direcion of Arrival estimation.

My CV can be found here and my PhD dissertation here. A short report I wrote (in the context of a grad course) on the interesting world of superconducting qubits can be found here. I also like photography, you can take a look at some of my photos here. A list of publications follows.

[6] G. Vougioukas and A. Bletsas, "DoA Estimation with a Single Antenna and a Few Low-Cost Backscattering Tags", IEEE Transactions on Communications, accepted for publication, Aug. 2022, to appear.

[5] G. Vougioukas, A. Bletsas and J. N. Sahalos, "Instantaneous, Zero-Feedback Fading Mitigation With Simple Backscatter Radio Tags", in IEEE Journal of Radio Frequency Identification, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 451-464, Dec. 2021.

[4] M. Ouroutzoglou, G. Vougioukas, G. N. Karystinos and A. Bletsas, "Multistatic Noncoherent Linear Complexity Miller Sequence Detection For Gen2 RFID/IoT", in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, vol. 20, no. 12, pp. 8067-8080, Dec. 2021.

[3] G. Vougioukas and A. Bletsas, "Switching Frequency Techniques for Universal Ambient Backscatter Networking", IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 464-477, Feb. 2019.

[2] A. Bletsas, P. N. Alevizos and G. Vougioukas, "The Art of Signal Processing in Backscatter Radio for µWatt (or less) Internet-of-Things (IoT)", invited, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, vol. 35, no. 5, pp. 28-40, Sept. 2018.

[1] G. Vougioukas, A. Dimitriou, A. Bletsas and J. Sahalos, "Practical Energy Harvesting for Batteryless Ambient Backscatter Sensors", MDPI Electronics 2018, 7, 95.

[2] G. Vougioukas and A. Bletsas, "Switching frequency methods and apparatus for ambient backscatter networking and jamming", U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) Patent 10763990, Sept. 1, 2020.

[1] G. Vougioukas and A. Bletsas, "Ultra-low Power and Cost Purely Analog Backscatter Sensors with Extended Range Smartphone/Consumer Electronics FM Reception", U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) Patent 10395162, Aug. 27, 2019.

[1] G. Vougioukas and A. Bletsas, "Smartphone Reception of MicroWatt Power, Meter-Kilometer Range, Backscatter Resistive/Capacitive Sensors with Ambient FM Remodulation & Selection Diversity", chapter 10 in "Wireless Power Transmission for Sustainable Electronics", John Wiley & Sons, Editor N. Carvalho, pp. 287-321, 2020.

[12] S. Peppas, E. Giannelos, G. Vougioukas and A. Bletsas, "Where is the Wall? Radar Imaging-Based Narrowband RFID and Reflector Localization", IEEE International Conference on RFID (RFID), May 2022, Las Vegas, USA.

[11] I. Vardakis, G. Kotridis, S. Peppas, K. Skyvalakis, G. Vougioukas and A. Bletsas, "Intelligently Wireless Batteryless RF-Powered Reconfigurable Surface", IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), Dec. 2021, Madrid, Spain.

[10] E. Andrianakis, G. Vougioukas, E. Giannelos, Orestis, Giannakopoulos, G. Apostolakis, K. Skyvalakis and A. Bletsas, "Drone Interrogation (and its Low-Cost Alternative) in Backscatter Environmental Sensor Networks", 6th International Conference on Smart and Sustainable Technologies (SpliTech), Sept. 2021, Split/Bol, Croatia.

[9] V. Papageorgiou, A. Nichoritis, P. Vasilakopoulos, G. Vougioukas and A. Bletsas, "Towards Ambiently Powered Inference on Wireless Sensor Networks: Asynchrony is the Key!", 5th IEEE International Workshop on Wireless Communications and Networking in Extreme Environments (WCNEE), July 2021. Received Best Paper Award.

[8] G. Vougioukas and A. Bletsas, "DoA Estimation of a Hidden RF Source Exploiting Simple Backscatter Radio Tags", IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), June 2021, Toronto, Canada.

[7] M. Ouroutzoglou, G. Vougioukas, P.N. Alevizos, A.G. Dimitriou and A. Bletsas, "Multistatic Gen2 RFID over Ethernet with Commodity SDRs", IEEE International Conference on RFID-Technology and Applications (RFID-TA), Sept. 2019, Pisa, Italy.

[6] G. Vougioukas and A. Bletsas, "Ambient Backscatter in Reality: Does Illuminator Signal Structure Matter?", 53rd IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), May 2019, Shanghai, P.R. China.

[5] P. N. Alevizos, G. Vougioukas and A. Bletsas, "Nonlinear Energy Harvesting Models in Wireless Information and Power Transfer", 19th IEEE International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC), June 2018, Kalamata, Greece.

[4] M. Vestakis, P. N. Alevizos, G. Vougioukas and A. Bletsas, "Multistatic Narrowband Localization in Backscatter Sensor Networks", 19th IEEE International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC), June 2018, Kalamata, Greece.

[3] G. Vougioukas, P. N. Alevizos and A. Bletsas, "Coherent Detector for Pseudo-FSK Backscatter under Ambient Constant Envelope Illumination", 19th IEEE International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC), June 2018, Kalamata, Greece.

[2] G. Vougioukas and A. Bletsas, "24 µWatt 26m range batteryless backscatter sensors with FM remodulation and selection diversity", 2017 IEEE International Conference on RFID Technology & Application (RFID-TA), Warsaw, Poland, September 2017. Received Best Student Paper Award. Research featured in June 2019 issue of Scientific American.

[1] G. Vougioukas, S.N. Daskalakis and A. Bletsas, "Could battery-less scatter radio tags achieve 270-meter range?", 2016 IEEE Wireless Power Transfer Conference (WPTC), Aveiro, Portugal, May 2016. Student Travel Grant Award.

A day back in July of 2015, I took a walk around the lab where I was working as an intern. As I was walking down an aisle, I noticed a large instrument with a beefy tube sticking out and on top of it, hiding behind a wall. I took a closer look at it and noticed two (diffusion) vacuum pumps and some high voltage cables.

Initially, I thought it was a scanning electron microscope (SEM), but by the looks of it, it just didn't seem to me as a SEM. There was a label "VG TRIO 2000". During the next 2-3 days, I spent serious time into trying to understand the whys and hows of mass spectrometers.

The process of "discovering" something unknown to me, being either a device, a concept, an old instrument or a technical problem and trying to understand it, work it, repair it or design something with it, is something that excites me-makes me want to get out of bed in the morning (or makes it more difficult by making me stay up late)-brings a kid-like enthusiasm to the surface. It can be something ranging from how a quadrupole mass filter works, to the excitement following the understanding of the beauty of Seiko's spring drive and the basic mechanism of ATP synthase within the electron transport chain.

Why wireless communications in specific? As a kid I tore a lot of things apart (I still do, but my tastes are now a bit more exotic) from old video cameras, audio amps and TVs, to fuel pumps and chainsaw engines. Of all these things, I liked radios the most. The fact that a circuit board with some form of wire sticking out of it could receive voice from kilometers away fascinated me a lot.

There is nothing like the feeling of solving an interesting and "difficult" technical problem. The feeling is amplified when the problem is solved along with colleagues sharing the same enthusiasm and devotion to the problem (see Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine, or the story of Lockheed's Skunkworks). Additional gain is offered to the aforementioned excitement, when the solution is simple and may also solve other problems or aspects of the initial problem as well.

I believe that the soul of a scientist or an engineer is photographed (within a satirical context), by the following (summarized) excerpt:

"I wonder about turtles, when they pull in their heads, do their spines buckle or contract?". This, own-raised, question, got Dr. Hoenikker so interested in turtles that he stopped working on the atom bomb. One night, desperate they were, some people from the Manhattan project went into Dr. Hoenikker's lab and stole the turtles and the aquarium. The next day Dr. Hoenikker said nothing, he just look for things to play with and think about, and everything there was to play with and think about had something to do with the bomb.

Some interesting reads