On Friday, January 25^th, Dr. Constantinos Daskalakis, distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), spoke to College High School students about the past, present and future of Artificial Intelligence.

The professor was welcomed and introduced by Richard Jackson, College President, and Apostolos Athanasopoulos, Co-Director of Athens College and Coordinator of the HAEF School Units.

The students took great interest in the speech and at the end asked him questions.

Afterwards, Prof. Daskalakis was given a tour of Benaki Hall by a team of students. They were accompanied by Co-Director of Athens College and Coordinator of the HAEF School Units, Apostolos Athanasopoulos, and Director of Communications & Marketing, Alexandra Aivalioti.

Dr. Daskalakis was taken to the attic of Benaki Hall where the Science and Computer Labs are housed today. There he admired the first computer acquired by our Schools in the 1960s, donated by the late Michael Dertouzos, College alumnus (’54) and a distinguished professor at MIT as well.

A brief profile of Constantinos Daskalakis:

He holds a diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC-Berkeley, and was honored with a Microsoft Graduate Research Fellowship.  His research interests lie in theoretical computer science and its interface with economics, statistics and artificial learning.

He is considered one of the most brilliant minds under the age of 40, having managed to solve Nash’s equilibrium – a problem that arose from John Nash’s work which stood unresolved since 1950.  For this feat, Daskalakis was awarded the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize in 2018, one of the most coveted distinctions in Mathematics internationally.

He has also been the recipient of other awards, amongst them: the 2008 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, the Game Theory and Computer Science (Kalai) Prize from the Game Theory Society, the 2010 Sloan Fellowship in Computer Science, the 2011 SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize, the 2011 Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Distinguished Teaching, the 2012 Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, the 2015 Research and Development Award by the Vatican Giuseppe Sciacca Foundation, the 2017 Google Faculty Research Award, the 2018 Simons Investigator Award, and the Best Paper award at the ACM Conferences on Economics and Computation in 2006 and in 2013.

His future plans include the establishment in Greece of a Research Center of international standards, in response to the so-called “brain drain” that has been observed in recent year.