Christos H. Papadimitriou
Principal ScientistChristos H. Papadimitriou is the Donovan Family Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. Before joining Columbia in 2017 he taught at Berkeley for 22 years, and before that at Harvard, MIT, Athens Polytechnic, Stanford, and UCSD. He has written four widely used textbooks, and hundreds of articles on algorithms and complexity, and their applications to optimization, databases, control, AI and robotics, economics and game theory, the Internet, evolution, and the brain; his work has been cited over 80,000 times. He was the founding Senior Scientist of the Simons Institute on the Theory of Computing. He holds a PhD from Princeton and nine honorary doctorates, including from ETH, EPFL, and the Universities of Athens and Paris, while in 2014 the President of the Hellenic Republic named him commander of the Order of the Phoenix. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the US, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering, and has received the Knuth prize, the Gödel prize, the von Neumann medal, and Technion’s Harvey award. He has also written three novels: “Turing,” “Logicomix” (with Apostolos Doxiadis) and “Independence.”
Constantinos Daskalakis
Principal ScientistConstantinos Daskalakis is a Professor of Computer Science at MIT and a member of MIT’s Computer Science and AI Laboratory. Between 2008 and 2009, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research, New England, and has been at MIT since 2009. He became a tenured Professor in 2015 and full Professor in 2018. Prof. Daskalakis works on computation theory and its interface with game theory, economics, probability theory, statistics and machine learning. His work on the complexity of the Nash equilibrium, with Paul Goldberg and Christos Papadimitriou, received the Kalai Prize from the Game Theory Society and the Outstanding Paper Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). He has also received the 2008 Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the 2010 Sloan Foundation fellowship, the 2011 Spira Award for Distinguished Teaching, the 2012 Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, the 2017 Google Faculty Research Award. In 2018, Daskalakis was awarded the prestigious Nevanlinna Prize by the International Mathematical Union for "transforming our understanding of the computational complexity of fundamental problems in markets, auctions, equilibria and other economic structures," and the prestigious Simons Foundation Investigator award in Theoretical Computer Science, an award designed for "outstanding scientists in their most productive years," who are "providing leadership to the field." In 2019, he was awarded the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award and the Bodossaki Foundation Distinguished Young Scientists Award.
Timos Sellis
Scientific DirectorTimos Sellis was a Research Scientist at Facebook (USA, 2020-22) while between 2016 and 2020 he was a Professor and the Director of the Data Science Research Institute. In the past, he has been a faculty member at the University of Maryland (USA, 1986-92), the National Technical University of Athens (Greece, 1992-2013), and RMIT University (Australia, 2013-2016). Prof. Sellis was also the inaugural Director of the Institute of Information Systems (IMIS) of the "Athena" Research Center between 2007 and 2013. His research interests include data science, big data, data streams, data integration, and spatio- temporal database systems. He is a recipient of the prestigious Presidential Young Investigator (PYI) award given by the President of USA to the most talented new researchers (1990), and of the VLDB 1997 10 Year Paper Award in 1997 (awarded to the paper published in the proceedings of the VLDB 1987 conference that had the biggest impact in the field of database systems in the decade 1987-97). He was the president of the National Council for Research and Technology of Greece (2001-2003). In November 2009, he was awarded the status of IEEE Fellow, and in November 2013 the status of ACM Fellow, for his contributions to database query optimization, spatial data management, and data warehousing. In March 2018 he received the IEEE TCDE Impact Award, for contributions to database systems research and broadening the reach of data engineering research.
