PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Christos Tzamos

Christos Tzamos is a theoretical computer scientist whose work on learning from noisy data and on mechanism design connects machine learning with economics. He grew up in Athens, studied electrical and computer engineering at the National Technical University of Athens, and wrote an MIT thesis on mechanism design under Constantinos Daskalakis that won the 2017 Sprowls Award. After a postdoc at Microsoft Research New England, he joined the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2018, and in 2019 he, Ilias Diakonikolas and Themis Gouleakis won a NeurIPS Outstanding Paper Award for the first efficient algorithm for learning linear separators in the presence of Massart noise. An NSF CAREER Award followed in 2022, and in March 2026 he and colleagues at Percepta published “Can LLMs Be Computers?”, a post on running programs inside transformers. He is an associate professor at the University of Athens, a researcher at Archimedes AI and a founding researcher at Percepta.

Badges

Timeline

  1. 2006

    Informatics Olympiad and NTUA

    He grows up in Athens, wins a silver medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics in 2006, and studies electrical and computer engineering at the National Technical University of Athens.

  2. 2013

    Best paper at EC 2013

    As a PhD student in MIT's Theory and Computation group, he wins best paper and best student paper awards at the 14th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce in 2013. The award-winning work on revenue-optimal auctions links auction design to transportation theory.

  3. 2017

    A Sprowls Award thesis at MIT

    His MIT PhD thesis on mechanism design, advised by Constantinos Daskalakis, wins the 2017 George M. Sprowls Award for the best computer science PhD thesis in the EECS department.

  4. 2018

    Joining the UW–Madison faculty

    After a postdoc at Microsoft Research New England, he joins the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the fall of 2018. He plans to continue his research on mechanism design, algorithms and machine learning.

  5. 2019

    A NeurIPS Outstanding Paper

    In 2019, he, Ilias Diakonikolas and Themis Gouleakis win the NeurIPS Outstanding Paper Award for “Distribution-Independent PAC Learning of Halfspaces with Massart Noise”. The paper gives the first efficient algorithm for learning linear separators in the presence of Massart noise.

  6. 2022

    An NSF CAREER Award

    He receives a 2022 NSF CAREER Award for the project “Learning Algorithms with Robustness and Efficiency Guarantees”. Vasilis Kontonis and Evangelia Gergatsouli, two of his UW–Madison PhD students, go on to postdocs at UT Austin and Georgia Tech.

  7. March 2026

    A computer inside a transformer

    In March 2026, he and colleagues at Percepta publish “Can LLMs Be Computers?”, a post on executing programs inside transformers with exponentially faster inference. The work builds a WebAssembly interpreter into the transformer's weights, and a 2D attention head design cuts the cost of each attention lookup from O(n) to O(log n).

  8. As of October 2026

    Athens professor and Percepta researcher

    He is an associate professor in the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications at the University of Athens and a researcher at Archimedes AI. Percepta, an AI transformation company under General Catalyst, counts him as a founding researcher. His research lies at the interface of computer science with machine learning, statistics, probability theory and economics.

Career

  1. NowNational and Kapodistrian University of AthensAssociate Professor
  2. NowARCHIMEDESResearcher
  3. NowPerceptaFounding Researcher
  4. Until 2018Microsoft ResearchPostdoctoral Researcher
  5. From 2018University of Wisconsin–Madison

Education

  1. 2017Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyPhD
  2. From 2006National Technical University of Athens

From the biography.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Christos Tzamos. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. The United States employs an estimated 48% of people shaping AIIncludes Athena Research and Innovation Center In Information Communication & Knowledge Technologies. We estimate where the people shaping AI work today, how universities, companies and research institutes split across countries, and how country shares have changed since the 1960s.
  3. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  4. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. Christos Tzamos comes to UW-Madison researching algorithms and machine learning theory cs.wisc.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Christos Tzamos tzamos.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Christos Tzamos – Simons Foundation simonsfoundation.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. UW-Madison Dept. of Computer Sciences professors Diakonikolas and Tzamos presented with outstanding paper award at NeurIPS 2019 cs.wisc.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. NeurIPS 2019 Awards neurips.cc. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. NeurIPS 2019 Outstanding Paper Awards - KDnuggets kdnuggets.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Can LLMs Be Computers? | Percepta percepta.ai. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Karpathy Praises Transformer's Built-in Computer: Handles 30,000 Tokens per Second and Solves World's Toughest Sudoku eu.36kr.com. Checked 21 October 2026.