Constantinos Daskalakis

Constantinos (or Costis) Daskalakis is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and an affiliate of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and the Operations Research Center (ORC). He is also an investigator in the MIT Institute for Foundations of Data Science (MIFODS).

Daskalakis completed his undergraduate studies in Greece, at the National Technical University of Athens, and obtained a PhD in Computer Science at UC Berkeley. He was a postdoctoral researcher in Microsoft Research-New England in 2008-2009, and has been with the MIT faculty since 2009.

Daskalakis works on computation theory and its interface with game theory, economics, probability theory, statistics and machine learning.

He has resolved long-standing open problems about the computational complexity of the Nash equilibrium, the mathematical structure and computational complexity of multi-item auctions, and the behavior of machine-learning methods such as the expectation–maximization algorithm. He has obtained computationally and statistically efficient methods for statistical hypothesis testing and learning in high-dimensional settings, as well as results characterizing the structure and concentration properties of high-dimensional distributions.

Daskalakis along with Goldberg and Papadimitriou, who was his PhD advisor, were honored by the Game Theory Society with the Kalai Prize for their work on the Computational Complexity of Nash equilibrium. Their same work was honored with the 2011 SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize.

Daskalakis was also the recipient of the 2018 Nevanlinna Prize from the International Mathematical Union, the 2018 Simons Investigator Award, the 2018 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the 2008 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, and the 2019 Bodossaki Foundation Distinguished Young Scientists Award.

Other awards and honors include the 2007 Microsoft Graduate Research Fellowship, the 2009 NSF Career Award, the 2010 Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the 2011 MIT Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Distinguished Teaching, 2012 Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, the 2017 Google Faculty Award, and the 2019 MIT EECS Frank Quick Faculty Research Innovation Fellowship. His work also received the 2006, 2012 and 2013 Best Student Paper Award at the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, and the 2013 Best Paper Award at the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation.

Daskalakis sits in the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing Scientific Advisory Board, and is an advisory editor for Games and Economic Behavior.