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Professor Evangelos Pournaras

Professor Evangelos Pournaras

Profile

I am Professor of Trustworthy Distributed Intelligence in the School of Computing 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 haves 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.

Research interests

My research focuses on the self-management of decentralized networked systems designed to empower citizens’ participation for a more democratic and sustainable digital society.

Designing decentralized and self-managed techno-socio-economic systems that can continuously self-adapt, self-heal, self-repair, self-organize and ultimately self-regulate the production and consumption of our resources, e.g. energy, food supplies, sharing vehicles, etc., are means for a sustainable development as I show in my research. Supply-demand data sharing systems self-regulated via differential privacy mechanisms and distributed ledger systems, i.e. blockchain, can protect citizens’ privacy, while incentivizing a fair data sharing for a high quality of service. System-wide, citizens’ active participation and autonomy raises communication and computational challenges: Data streams need to propagate rapidly and regularly in a distributed network. Citizens’ collective choices often have combinatorial complexity.

Decentralized optimization and collective learning over crowd-sourced computational resources of citizens is the main challenge of my research. Tackling this challenge can have a tremendous impact on a new generation of artificial intelligence for socio-technical systems equipped with socially responsible self-management capabilities applied on emerging application domains of Smart Grids, Smart Cities and their sharing economies.

<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>

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>