Evangelos Pournaras

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT EVANGELOS POURNARAS

I am an inter-disciplinary computer scientist conducting research on the interface of distributed systems, human-centered artificial intelligence and social science. I am fascinated to understand the socio-technical complexity of collective decisions-making problems in Smart Cities and how to build software systems to digitally assist the coordination of such decisions. Coordinated decision-making has an unprecedented and multi-faceted impact on digital society. It can help us prevent power blackouts, traffic jams, improve the legitimacy of democratic and participatory decisions as well as unravel new pathways for sustainability by decarbonizing energy and transport with renewables, electric, shared and autonomous vehicles. To achieve this, I design systems that foster human-machine collective intelligence to support decisions that are efficient but also fair, trustworthy and accountable. I make this possible by combining the scalability, trust and privacy-by-design of distributed computing with learning capabilities for multi-agent systems to optimize socio-technical systems in a socially responsible way. Some highlights of my research output include a collecting learning framework for self-managing socio-technical systems (http://epos-net.org), a fully decentralized and privacy-preserving system for real-time data analytics (http://dias-net.org), a value-sensitive decision-support system for sustainable consumption as well as a crowd sensing system for living lab experimentation and augmented democracy (http://smart-agora.org).