Several highlights on Makis' work include his participation at the Johns Hopkins CLSP Summer Workshop (WS'00) on audio-visual speech recognition, teaching at the 2001 ELSNET summer school, a tutorial at ICIP 2003, plenary talks at AVSP 2003 and VisHCI 2006, panel participation at MMSP 2006, an invited talk at ASRU 2009, and serving as a guest editor of special issues of the EURASIP JASP 2002, IEEE TASLP 2009, and IEEE TMM 2011 journals. He also received the best paper award at ICME 2005 and was co-author of the best student paper at Interspeech 2007. He has also served as a member of the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee (2009-2011).

Makis' research interests span the areas of multimodal speech processing with applications to human-computer interaction and ambient intelligence, with particular emphasis on audio-visual speech processing, automatic speech recognition, multimedia signal processing and fusion, as well as computer vision for human detection and tracking. He has published about 100 articles in these areas that have received over 800 citations and has seven patents granted. He is a member of IEEE and a member of the Technical Chamber of Greece.