Former Archimedes Intern Receives the EETN Best Doctoral Thesis Award for 2025

Georgios Papasotiropoulos, a former intern of the Archimedes unit of the Athena Research Center, Greece, received the Hellenic Artificial Intelligence Society's (EETN) Best Doctoral Thesis Award for the year 2025. His doctoral thesis was on "Algorithmic and Game-Theoretic Aspects of Computational Social Choice" and his supervisor was Vangelis Markakis, a Professor at the Department of Informatics of the Athens University of Economics & Business (AUEB), Greece and a Lead Researcher at the Archimedes research unit in AI, Data Sciences, and Algorithms of the Athena Research Center in Athens, Greece.

Professor Vangelis Markakis mentioned that: "The dissertation of Mr Papasotiropoulos, situated in the field of computational social choice, makes timely and significant contributions to the analysis of election rules in voting theory. He provides theoretical insights into the complexity of elections with conditional preferences, the vulnerability of such elections to adversarial manipulation, and the impact of conditional preferences on the proportional representation. Furthermore, he introduces innovative approximation algorithms and models for proxy voting and liquid democracy. This includes addressing optimal vote delegation for social welfare, modeling deliberation phases where voters update their opinions, and accounting for scenarios involving incomplete preferences. The impact and technical quality of this thesis are evidenced by its publication record in top-tier AI venues (including 3 IJCAI papers, AAMAS, ADT, SAGT, and Theoretical Computer Science) and its strong citation count. Ultimately, we believe this research holds profound potential for application in the broader domains of Economics and Democracy."

Georgios Papasotiropoulos is currently a postdoc researcher in the group of principal investigator and Associate Professor Piotr Skowron of the Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics, and Mechanics at the University of Warsaw in Poland, and part of an ERC-funded project aiming to "design new generic election rules, protocols and algorithms that ensure proportionality—an equal treatment of implicit groups of voters (i.e., groups that are not declared upfront)." The exact title of this project is "Proportional Algorithms for Democratic Decisions (PRO-DEMOCRATIC)" and is funded by an ERC Starting Grant of €1.479.938.

Finally, let us add that the Hellenic Artificial Intelligence Society (EETN) is a non profit scientific organization promoting artificial intelligence research in Greece and abroad, and supports eleven research areas on AI. Currently, it is organizing the 2026 Hellenic Conference in Artificial Intelligence (SETN) in Chania, on the island of Crete in Greece, from September 9-11, 2026.

 

Georgios' doctoral thesis can be found here.
Hellenic Artificial Intelligence Society's (EETN) webpage can be found here.