At the Municipal Theater of Piraeus, on Tuesday, July 9th 2024, the University of Piraeus organized the ceremony of announcing Professor of Informatics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) Konstantinos Daskalakis, as Honorary Professor of the School of Information and Communication Technologies of the University of Piraeus.
The ceremony began with an address by the Rector of the University of Piraeus, Professor Michael Sfakianakis, and was followed by the presentation (Laudatio) of the honouree’s work by the Dean of the School of Information Technology and Communications, Professor Ilias Maglogiannis.
The Rector of the University of Piraeus, Professor Michael Sfakianakis in his opening speech stated that this award is an act of the highest honor reserved by the University for personalities whose path is a source of inspiration and whose work, action and values have a guiding value for all of us.
Konstantinos Daskalakis, a globally leading scientist in the field of Information Science, Economics, Statistics, Mathematics as well as Game Theory, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, a researcher with ethics, passion and perseverance, is a role model for the researchers and academics internationally, but above all it is a model for our students, our graduates, the youth of our country.
The Laudatio was presented by the Dean of the School of Information and Communication Technologies, Professor Ilias Maglogiannis, who recounted the truly impressive course of the honoree in his academic life, his awards for his research work and the impact he has had this in Science as a whole.
The award ceremony ended with the honoree, who thanked the University and the Faculty for the honor, and in an inspiring speech he spoke about the developments in artificial intelligence, his current research field, difficulties and challenges that science is called upon to manage as well as the limitations that exist in this field that affects and will continue to affect the daily lives of all of us.
The ceremony was attended by the Minister of Digital Governance, Dimitrios Papastergiou, the Rector of Panteion University, Christina Koulouri, Hellenic Single Public Procurement Authority (HSPPA), Androniki Theotokatos.
The Vice-Presidents of the Hellenic Court of Audit, Evangelia Elissavet Kouloumbini and Konstantinos Kostopoulos, the President of the Hellenic Confederation of Commerce and Entrepreneurship (HECC) George Karanikas.
Τhe Mayor of Niκαια Ag. I. Renti Konstantinos Maragakis, the Dean of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens Panagiotis Tsanakas, the President of the Chamber of Commerce of Piraeus Giorgos Papamanolis - Dozas, the President of the Piraeus Chamber of Commerce, Theodoros Kapralos, members of the Board of Administration of the University of Piraeus, multitude of professors, students and graduates.
Constantinos Daskalakis is the Avanessians Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He holds a Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley.
He works on Computation Theory and its interface with Game Theory, Economics, Probability Theory, Machine Learning and Statistics. He has resolved long-standing open problems about the computational complexity of Nash equilibrium, and the mathematical structure and computational complexity of multi-item auctions.
His current work focuses on multi-agent learning, high-dimensional statistics, learning from biased and dependent data, causal inference and econometrics. He has been honored with the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, the Kalai Prize from the Game Theory Society, the Sloan Fellowship in Computer Science, the SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize, the Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, the Simons Investigator Award, the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize from the International Mathematical Union, the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the Bodossaki Foundation Distinguished Young Scientists Award, the ACM SIGECOM Test of Time Award, and the FOCS 2022 Test of Time Award.
He is an ACM fellow, holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Patras, and was awarded the Golden Cross of the Order of the Redeemer by the Greek Presidency. He has served in the scientific and advisory board of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing (2018-2020), and as the head of the theory of computation group at MIT (2018-2022). He is a co-founder of Archimedes AI research center where he maintains the role of chief scientist.