Nassos Katsamanis is a Principal Researcher at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) of the Athena Research Center (Athena RC). His research focuses on spoken dialogue systems, artificial virtual agents, and the computational modeling and understanding of human behavior through multimodal signal processing. Notably, he co-created Meltemi, the first open large language model for the Greek language. He also serves as the Chief Technology Officer at Behavioral Signals, leading a team in developing conversation analytics based on affective computing of spoken interactions. In addition to his research and entrepreneurial endeavors, Nassos teaches two graduate courses on conversational AI and speech technologies at the University of Athens. Nassos earned his M.Eng. and Ph.D. from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 2003 and 2009, respectively, and then worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC) for nearly three years. Upon returning to Greece, he worked at NTUA on audiovisual saliency and speech synthesis, and at the Robotic Perception and Interaction Unit of Athena RC, focusing on smart-home speech technologies and human-robot interfaces for children and the elderly. He has published over 80 papers in international peer-reviewed journals and conferences and his work has been cited more than 3000 times so far.