PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Michalis Vazirgiannis

Also known as Μιχάλης Βαζιργιάννης

Michalis Vazirgiannis is a Distinguished Professor at École Polytechnique who works on machine and deep learning for graphs and text. After studies in Athens and Edinburgh, he taught at the Athens University of Economics and Business from 1997 to 2013, with a Marie Curie fellowship at INRIA in Paris from 2006 to 2008. He became a professor at École Polytechnique in 2013, where he heads the Data Science and Mining group (DaSciM), and his Graph-of-Words work won the best paper award at ACM CIKM 2013. Tencent gave him its Rhino-Bird International Academic Expert Award in 2017, he received a best paper award at IJCAI in 2018, and the GraKeL graph kernel library he coauthored appeared in the Journal of Machine Learning Research in 2020. In 2024 he coauthored the Atlas-Chat language models for Moroccan Arabic, and he is also an affiliate professor at MBZUAI and an academic director of École Polytechnique's master's program in Large Language Models, Graphs and Applications.

Timeline

  1. 1990–1994

    Studies in Athens and Edinburgh

    He holds a physics degree and a PhD in informatics from Athens University, with doctoral studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens running from 1990 to 1994. He also takes a master's degree in AI at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, studying there from 1992 to 1994.

  2. 1997–2013

    Associate professor in Athens

    He joins the Athens University of Economics and Business as a lecturer in 1997 and is an associate professor of databases and information systems from 2005 until 2013. A Marie Curie Intra European Fellowship takes him to INRIA in Paris from 2006 to 2008.

  3. 2013–2016

    Professor at École Polytechnique

    He becomes a professor at École Polytechnique in 2013 and a Distinguished Professor in 2016, and he leads the Data Science and Mining group (DaSciM) at its computer science laboratory LIX. His Graph-of-Words representation of text, applied to keyword extraction, summarization and event detection, wins the best paper award at ACM CIKM 2013.

  4. 2015–2018

    AXA chair and two awards

    From 2015 to 2018, he leads the AXA Data Science chair. Tencent gives him its Rhino-Bird International Academic Expert Award in 2017, and he receives a best paper award at IJCAI in 2018.

  5. 2020

    The GraKeL graph kernel library

    The Journal of Machine Learning Research publishes GraKeL in 2020, a Python library that he coauthors with Giannis Siglidis, Giannis Nikolentzos, Stratis Limnios, Christos Giatsidis and Konstantinos Skianis. It unifies several graph kernels in one framework and follows the scikit-learn interface.

  6. 2020–2026

    ANR chair on graph learning

    From 2020 to 2026, he holds the ANR chair AML-HELAS on machine and deep learning for heterogeneous large-scale data, with deep learning for graph representations as its main research axis. A WASP/KTH chair runs from 2020 to 2025.

  7. 2024

    Atlas-Chat for Moroccan Arabic

    He coauthors Atlas-Chat in 2024, a collection of 2B, 9B and 27B language models for Moroccan Arabic, also known as Darija, fine-tuned on a new instruction dataset.

  8. As of October 2026

    Distinguished professor and LLGA director

    He is a Distinguished Professor at École Polytechnique and, since 2025, an affiliate professor at MBZUAI in the UAE, where his work includes multimodal LLMs for proteins and cells. He is also one of the two academic directors of École Polytechnique's two-year master's program in Large Language Models, Graphs and Applications (LLGA).

Career

  1. Since 2025Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial IntelligenceAffiliate Professor
  2. Since 2013École PolytechniqueProfessor, Distinguished Professor
  3. 2006–2008InriaMarie Curie Intra European Fellow
  4. 1997–2013Athens University of Economics and BusinessLecturer, Associate Professor of Databases and Information Systems

Education

  1. 1994National and Kapodistrian University of AthensPhD
  2. 1994Heriot-Watt UniversityMaster's in AI

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 Michalis Vazirgiannis. 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 median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes École Polytechnique. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  3. The United States employs an estimated 48% of people shaping AIIncludes Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence. 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.
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes École Polytechnique. 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.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Michalis Vazirgiannis yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Michalis Vazirgiannis - Institut Polytechnique de Paris researchportal.ip-paris.fr. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Michalis Vazirgiannis | alphaXiv alphaxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. IMSI, Member Info: Michalis Vazirgiannis imsi.athenarc.gr. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Michalis Vazirgiannis – LOGML 2026 logml.ai. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. ChairesIA_2019_1 - Apprentissage machine/profond pour données hétérogènes à grande échelle – AML-HELAS anr.fr. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Michalis Vazirgiannis – DeepLearn 2024 deeplearn.irdta.eu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. GraKeL: A Graph Kernel Library in Python jmlr.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Michalis Vazirgiannis – WISE 2026 conferences.sigappfr.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. Atlas-Chat: Adapting Large Language Models for Low-Resource Moroccan Arabic Dialect arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. Large Language Models, Graphs and Applications (LLGA) msct.dix.polytechnique.fr. Checked 21 October 2026.