John Zakos is a computer scientist, the Co-Founder, Chief Information Officer, and Director of MyCyberTwin.  He holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and he is a Research Fellow at Griffith University, Australia. His experience spans both managing business development and leading technical teams in the development of emerging technologies in Asia-Pacific and the USA. Recently his company was bought by IBM.

Mr. Zakos has a PhD in Information Technology from Griffith University in Queensland. He won a scholarship to continue his studies, and he visited the United States where for a year and a half he studied the latest developments in the sector. Nowadays he is a visiting professor at the University of Griffith, School of Information Technology, and member of the international planning.

John Zakos’s roots are in Gythio, by his father’s side, and in Chania, Crete, where his mother comes from and he does not hide his passion for the Greek language.

Dr Zakos was a key member of the founding management and engineering teams that built the Mooter platform. Mooter, a global leader in search and contextual advertising technology, has attracted international recognition from several authoritative sources, including the MIT Technology Review.

He was working in the IBM Research Lab in Japan, and his work focused on the development of world leading information retrieval and knowledge mining technology. Previously at Ixla Limited, he was involved in the commercialization of award digital photography and winning web publishing software. Co-founding MyCyberTwin in 2005, the company has become recognized as a world leader in delivering virtual human solutions. Having received a major financial grant of a half million dollars from the Australian government – which believed in his vision- Mr. Zakos managed to build a platform that gives everyone the opportunity to create his twin –a digital entity- on the internet, which can easily replace them and talk to their friends, colleagues, customers and to anyone wishing to contact them online!

He argues that his invention is not coming to replace the employee. On the contrary the aim is to release him to be able to develop other activities away from the working environment. The CyberTwin can work efficiently 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and has very good rates of performance, though it is programmed to collect information that evaluates, in accordance with the guidelines been given. The eminent scientist is already examining more complex applications, such as the assistance that the cybertwin can offer in driving, reading messages, and even cooking.

At the same time, the inventor claims that the functionality of cybertwin depends to a large extent on the information the «owner» wants to give, who has the sole responsibility for whether his “creature” will be a replica of himself, or the «showing» of his wannabe.

It is worth noting that the Phoenix, the last U.S. envoy to the planet Mars had a voice and spoke in «Greek» thanks to J. Zakos. The invention MyCyberTwin, went on Mars, providing an opportunity for anyone who wished to undertake an informative trip to the distant planet, and worked – and with the assistance of NASA, as the “voice” of the Phoenix.