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Professor Evangelos Pournaras

Professor Evangelos Pournaras

  • Position: Professor of Trustworthy Distributed Intelligence
  • Areas of expertise: distributed intelligence; trustworthy AI; blockchain; collective decision making; digital democracy; computational social systems; Internet of Things; Smart Cities; Smart Grids
  • Email: E.Pournaras@leeds.ac.uk
  • Phone: +44(0)113 343 4810
  • Website: Github TDI Lab | LinkedIn | Googlescholar | ORCID

Profile

I am Professor of Trustworthy Distributed Intelligence in the School of Computer Science at University of Leeds. I am also a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow (£1.4M), a Research Associate at the UCL Center of Blockchain Technologies and has also been an Alan Turing Fellow.

I have more than 5 years of research experience at ETH Zurich after having completed my PhD studies at Delft University of Technology. I have also been a visiting researcher at EPFL and has industry experience at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.

I have won the Augmented Democracy Prize, the 1st prize at ETH Policy Challenge as well as 5 paper awards and honors, including the listing of two of my project within UNESCO IRCAI Global Top-100 as `outstanding' and `promising'. I have published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers in high impact journals and conferences.

I have extensive leadership experience and raised funding for national and EU projects such as H2OforAll, ASSET and SoBigData.

Responsibilities

  • School Representative at the Faculty Research Ethics Committee (FREC)

Research interests

I study socio-technical systems that exhibit distributed intelligence of human and artificial nature and how to build such systems to be trustworthy by design. 

My research focuses on the foundations (algorithms, models and architectures) and real-world applications in the domains of digital democracy, sustainability, Smart Cities, energy, smart mobility, edge computing, Internet of Things, logistics, supply chain and sharing economies.

Awards and Honours

Selected Research Projects & Funding

  • 2022-2026, Digitall-assisted Collective Goverance of Smart City Commons (ARTIO), UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, PI, £1.4M
  • 2022-2025, Innovative Integrated Tools & Technologies to Protect & Treat Drinking Water from Disinfection Byproducts (DBPs) - H2OforAll, Horizon Europe, PI, €300K
  • 2020-2024, Trust and Legitimation in the Digital Democracy, NRP 77: Digital Transformation, Swiss National Science Foundation, PI, ₣192K
  • 2022-2023, New Edge-Cloud Infrastructure for Distributed Intelligent Computing, Alan Turing Institute, Co-PI, £50K
  • 2021-2022, Socially Responsible AI for Distributed Autonomous Systems, White Rose, PI, £11K
  • 2019-2020, Experience Quality of Life in Winterhur, Citizen Science Center Seed Grant, University of Zurich, Co-I, ₣50K
  • 2019, Self-organizing Systems for Wireless Communications, Competence Centers of Excelent Technologies (COMET), Co-I, €50K
  • 2016-2020, ASSET-Instant Gratification for Collective Awareness & Sustainable Consumerism, Horizon 2020, Co-I, €438K
  • 2015-2019, SoBigData-Social Mining & Big Data Ecosystem, Horizon 2020, Co-I, €918K

Research Highlights

Collective learning: This is a long-standing active research area on the management of large-scale socio-technical systems in Smart Cities using human-centered distributed artificial intelligence. It involves foundamental research on discrete-choice combinatorial optimization problems in decentralized multi-agent systems with a large portfolio of applications that involves among other: energy, transport, edge computing, data sharing, bike sharing, voting. 

Broader Outreach & Media Coverage

 

<h4>Research projects</h4> <p>Some research projects I'm currently working on, or have worked on, will be listed below. Our list of all <a href="https://eps.leeds.ac.uk/dir/research-projects">research projects</a> allows you to view and search the full list of projects in the faculty.</p>

Qualifications

  • PhD, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, 2013
  • MSc with Distinction in Internet Computing, University of Surrey, UK, 2007
  • BSc in Technology Education and Digital Systems, University of Piraeus, Greece, 2006

Student education

I have a track record of designing and delivering popular courses at University of Leeds and ETH Zurich, informed by cutting-edge research.

My teaching involves innovative learning and student engagement approaches based on hackathon-style learning activities and assessments. My approach on cross-disciplinary data science education is published.

I have designed the Blockchain Technologies module, which I teach since 2023. I also have experience with creating Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) such as the “How to Get Into Blockchain” by Coursera. 

Research groups and institutes

  • Distributed Systems and Services
  • Artificial Intelligence

Current postgraduate researchers

<h4>Postgraduate research opportunities</h4> <p>We welcome enquiries from motivated and qualified applicants from all around the world who are interested in PhD study. Our <a href="https://phd.leeds.ac.uk">research opportunities</a> allow you to search for projects and scholarships.</p>
Projects
    <li><a href="//phd.leeds.ac.uk/project/744-distributed-artificial-intelligence-for-collective-decisions-in-smart-cities">Distributed Artificial Intelligence for Collective Decisions in Smart Cities</a></li> <li><a href="//phd.leeds.ac.uk/project/1856-edge-to-cloud-smart-mobility:-ai-co-optimization-for-future-autonomous-vehicles">Edge-to-Cloud Smart Mobility: AI Co-optimization for Future Autonomous Vehicles</a></li>