Diomidis Spinellis

Diomidis Spinellis
Spinellis talking about the Antikythera mechanism
Born	Greek: Διομήδης Δ. Σπινέλλης (1967-02-02) 2 February 1967 (age 57)
Alma mater	Imperial College London (PhD)
Known for	Code Reading
Awards	International Obfuscated C Code Contest (1988, 1990, 1991, 1995)
Scientific career
Fields	Software Engineering IT Security[1]
Institutions	Athens University of Economics and Business Delft University of Technology[2]
Thesis	Programming paradigms as object classes : a structuring mechanism for multiparadigm programming (1994)
Doctoral advisor	Susan Eisenbach Sophia Drossopoulou[3]
Website	www.spinellis.gr

Diomidis D. Spinellis (Greek: Διομήδης Δ. Σπινέλλης; 2 February 1967, Athens) is a Greek computer science academic and author of the books Code Reading, Code Quality, Beautiful Architecture (co-author) and Effective Debugging.^[4][1][2]

Education

Spinellis holds a Master of Engineering degree in Software Engineering and a Ph.D. in Computer Science both from Imperial College London.^[5] His PhD was supervised by Susan Eisenbach and Sophia Drossopoulou.^[3]

Career and research

He is a professor at the Department of Management Science and Technology at the Athens University of Economics and Business, and a member of the IEEE Software editorial board, contributing the Tools of the Trade^[6] column. Since 2014, he is also editor-in-chief of IEEE Software. Spinellis is a four-time winner of the International Obfuscated C Code Contest in 1988, 1990, 1991 and 1995.^[7]

He is also a committer in the FreeBSD project, and author of a number of popular free or open-source systems: the UMLGraph^[8] declarative UML diagram generator, the bib2xhtml^[9] BibTeX to XHTML converter, the outwit^[10] Microsoft Windows data with command line programs integration tool suite, the CScout^[11] source code analyzer and refactoring browser,^[11] the socketpipe^[12] fast inter-process communication plumbing utility and directed graph shell^[13] the directed graph Unix shell for big data and stream processing pipelines.^[14]

In 2008, together with a collaborator, Spinellis claimed that "red links" (a Wikipedia slang for wikilinks that lead to non-existing pages) is what drives Wikipedia growth.^[15]

On 5 November 2009 he was appointed the General Secretary of Information Systems at the Greek Ministry of Finance.^[16] In October 2011, he resigned citing personal reasons.^[17][18]

On 20 March 2015 he was elected President of Open Technologies Alliance (GFOSS).^[19] GFOSS is a non-profit organization founded in 2008, 36 Universities and Research Centers are shareholders of GFOSS. The main goal of GFOSS is to promote Openness through the use and the development of Open Standards and Open Technologies in Education, Public Administration and Business in Greece. Spinellis uses open-source software to teach software engineering to his students.^[20]

References

1. Diomidis Spinellis publications indexed by Google Scholar
2. ORCID 0000-0003-4231-1897
3. Diomidis Spinellis at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
4. Diomidis Spinellis at DBLP Bibliography Server
5. Spinellis, Diomidis (1994). Programming paradigms as object classes : a structuring mechanism for multiparadigm programming. london.ac.uk (PhD thesis). University of London. OCLC 940344056.
6. Tools of the Trade
7. "Winners: The authors of winning IOCCC entries". www.ioccc.org. Retrieved 2021-07-01.
8. UMLGraph
9. bib2xhtml
10. outwit
11. Spinellis, Diomidis (2010). "CScout: A refactoring browser for C". Science of Computer Programming. 75 (4): 216–231. doi:10.1016/j.scico.2009.09.003.
12. socketpipe
13. dgsh – directed graph shell
14. Spinellis, D.; Fragkoulis, M. (2017). "Extending Unix Pipelines to DAGs". IEEE Transactions on Computers. 66 (9): 1547–1561. doi:10.1109/TC.2017.2695447. S2CID 24187971.
15. Spinellis, Diomidis; Louridas, Panagiotis (2008). "The collaborative organization of knowledge". Communications of the ACM. 51 (8): 68–73. doi:10.1145/1378704.1378720. S2CID 77400. Most new articles are created shortly after a corresponding reference to them is entered into the system
16. Palaiologos, Yiannis (2015) The 13th Labour of Hercules: Inside the Greek Crisis, Portobello Books Ltd, ISBN 978-1846275869
17. athensnews.gr Archived 2011-10-20 at the Wayback Machine
18. Katsomitros, Alex (March 24, 2015). "The Greek tech revolution: meet the citizens battling corruption". The Guardian.
19. "Board of Directors – GFOSS – Open Technologies Alliance".
20. Spinellis, Diomidis (2021). "Why computing students should contribute to open source software projects". Communications of the ACM. 64 (7): 36–38. doi:10.1145/3437254. ISSN 0001-0782. S2CID 235494834. “programming proficiency on its own is neither representative of the skills that the marketplace requires from computing graduates, nor does it offer the strong vocational qualifications it once did”