PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Orestis Papakyriakopoulos

Orestis Papakyriakopoulos is a computer scientist who studies how AI systems, datasets and online platforms affect fairness and democratic life. After studying civil engineering in Athens and philosophy of science and technology in Munich, they earned a computer science PhD at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), coauthored "Bias in word embeddings" in 2020, and then worked as a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton and as an AI Ethics Research Scientist at Sony AI. In 2024, they joined TUM as a professor, and their paper "Position: Measure Dataset Diversity, Don't Just Claim It," written with Dora Zhao, Jerone Andrews and Alice Xiang, won a Best Paper award at ICML. A general chair of ACM FAccT in Athens in 2025, they also coauthored the Fair Human-Centric Image Benchmark, published in Nature. They are an assistant professor of societal computing at TUM and head the Civic Machines Lab at the TUM Think Tank.

Now at
Technical University of Munich and Technical University of Munich Think Tank
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Timeline

  1. 2020

    Bias in word embeddings

    They study civil engineering at the National Technical University of Athens and philosophy of science and technology at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), where they also earn a PhD in computer science. In January 2020, they coauthor "Bias in word embeddings" with Simon Hegelich, Juan Carlos Medina Serrano and Fabienne Marco for the FAT* conference in Barcelona, comparing bias in embeddings trained on Wikipedia and on political social media data.

  2. 2021

    Postdoc at Princeton's CITP

    After a stint as a visiting scholar at the MIT Media Lab, they work as a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy. In July 2021, their study with Arwa Michelle Mboya, "Beyond Algorithmic Bias," examines Google's search-by-image algorithm by feeding it 40,000 images of individuals and recording the stereotypes it reproduces.

  3. 2023

    Ethics research at Sony AI

    Before joining TUM in 2024, they work as an AI Ethics Research Scientist at Sony AI. In 2023, they coauthor "Ethical Considerations for Responsible Data Curation," an oral paper at the NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks track that recommends practices for curating human-centric computer vision datasets, and write a talk on ethical speech recognition datasets with Alice Xiang.

  4. 2024

    Professor of societal computing

    In 2024, they join the Technical University of Munich as a professor of societal computing. Their research studies how AI systems, platforms and socio-technical infrastructures can become more fair, safe, democratic and useful.

  5. 2024

    Best paper award at ICML

    "Position: Measure Dataset Diversity, Don't Just Claim It," written with Dora Zhao, Jerone Andrews and Alice Xiang, receives a Best Paper award at ICML 2024. The paper analyzes "diversity" across 135 image and text datasets and applies principles from measurement theory to recommend how to conceptualize, operationalize and evaluate it.

  6. June 2025

    General chair of ACM FAccT

    In June 2025, the ACM FAccT conference on fairness, accountability and transparency meets in Athens, with Papakyriakopoulos serving as one of three general chairs alongside Asia Biega and Danaé Metaxa.

  7. November 2025

    The FHIBE fairness benchmark

    In November 2025, Nature publishes the Fair Human-Centric Image Benchmark (FHIBE), with Alice Xiang as first author and Papakyriakopoulos among the coauthors. FHIBE is a publicly available human image dataset built with consent, privacy and compensation practices, intended for evaluating fairness in tasks such as pose estimation, face detection and visual question answering.

  8. As of October 2026

    Heading the Civic Machines Lab

    They are an assistant professor of societal computing at TUM and head the Civic Machines Lab at the TUM Think Tank, which studies AI from the semiconductors powering computation to the algorithms shaping human experience. In 2026, the AAAI-26 special track on AI alignment publishes their study with Dalia Ali, Dora Zhao and Allison Koenecke, "Operationalizing Pluralistic Values in Large Language Model Alignment Reveals Trade-offs in Safety, Inclusivity, and Model Behavior," which fine-tunes language models on the rating preferences of 1,095 participants from the US and Germany.

Career

  1. Since 2024Technical University of MunichAssistant Professor of Societal Computing
  2. NowTechnical University of Munich Think TankHead
  3. 2023SonyAI Ethics Research Scientist
  4. 2021Princeton UniversityPostdoctoral Research Associate
  5. Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyVisiting Scholar

Education

  1. National Technical University of Athens
  2. Technical University of MunichPhD

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 Orestis Papakyriakopoulos. 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. 23% of people shaping AI who left a university for a company later returned to a universityIncludes Orestis Papakyriakopoulos. We estimate that 468 of the 2,011 people shaping AI who left a university for a company (23%) later returned to a university after a median of 5 years, and 163 of 829 (20%) made the reverse round trip.
  3. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Technical University of Munich. 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.
  4. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Technical University of Munich. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.

Colleagues

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

Sources and credits

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

  1. Prof. Dr. Orestis Papakyriakopoulos professoren.tum.de. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. Bias in word embeddings - Technical University of Munich portal.fis.tum.de. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. How Search Engines Show Their Bias: Orestis Papakyriakopoulos and Arwa Michelle Mboya - Princeton Engineering engineering.princeton.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. Orestis Papakyriakopoulos | Civic Machines civicmachines.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. Ethical Considerations for Responsible Data Curation arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. Considerations for Ethical Speech Recognition Datasets arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  7. ICML 2024 Awards icml.cc. Checked 22 October 2026.
  8. Position: Measure Dataset Diversity, Don't Just Claim It arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  9. News and Events - Societal Computing gov.sot.tum.de. Checked 22 October 2026.
  10. Fair human-centric image dataset for ethical AI benchmarking nature.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  11. Civic Machines Lab - TUM Think Tank tumthinktank.de. Checked 22 October 2026.
  12. Operationalizing Pluralistic Values in Large Language Model Alignment Reveals Trade-offs in Safety, Inclusivity, and Model Behavior ojs.aaai.org. Checked 22 October 2026.