I am a Connaught Scholar and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Computer Engineering and Electronics groups) and Computer Science at the University of Toronto. My research interests include game-theoretical incentives for crypto-economics, mechanism/system design of distributed ledger (blockchain or Web 3.0) systems, formal methods, Central Bank Digital Currencies, decentralized finance (DeFi), techno-legal questions for distributed ledger technology, and data analytics for fintech. I have also worked extensively in the area of CAD for VLSI verification, debug, synthesis and test. My complete CV can be found here.  

I obtained my PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Department of Computer Science, my MSc from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles , Department of Computer Science and my Diploma from the University of Patras, Department of Computer Engineering and Informatics. I stayed as a visiting faculty at the University of Illinois in 1998-99 before I joined UofT in August 1999. In the past, I also held faculty positions at the Athens University of Economics and Business and at the University of Tokyo .  

In 2020-21 I was commissioned by the Bank of Canada to co-author a technical, legal and economic report on Canada's candidate digital currency. This report for a Central Bank Digital Loonie can be found here .  

As I worked in the entertainment industry for many years, I was part of a small team that conducted the first webcast (video and audio) ever over the internet (37th Annual Grammy Awards, March 1, 1995), an event that was later acknowledged by the American Congress. In 2013 I was nominated for the Bower Award and Price in Science by Turing Award recipient Prof. Stephen Cook for contributions in the area of verification. My group has received many best paper awards, more notably, at ASP-DAC 2014 with a "Ten Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper" award, and at ICSE 2024 with the flagship ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award. Our research is privileged to have received generous gifts by Ripple (University Blockchain Research Inititative) and by IBM (Faculty Award). I am currently an Associate Editor of the IEEE Trans. on Network and Service Management, and a member of the Steering Committee for the IEEE Int'l Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency, and IEEE Conference on Blockchain Research & Applications for Innovative Networks and Services.

I am member of AAAS, ACM, AMS, IEEE, Technical Chamber of Greece, TTTC, Professional Engineers of Ontario and the Planetary Society. I am also an alumnus of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science, and a member of the Advisory Board for the Investment Industry Association of Canada (IIAC).