Ilias Diakonikolas

Ilias Diakonikolas is the Lubar Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, working on the algorithmic foundations of massive datasets and efficient algorithms for fundamental problems in machine learning. He earned a diploma in electrical and computer engineering from the National Technical University of Athens and a PhD in computer science from Columbia University under Mihalis Yannakakis, and held earlier positions at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Southern California and a Simons postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley. He has received a Sloan Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a best paper award at NeurIPS 2019, and the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award in 2025 for his breakthrough techniques in algorithm design.