Rate My Professor Evangelos Pournaras

Professor Evangelos Pournaras is Professor of Trustworthy Distributed Intelligence in the School of Computer Science at the University of Leeds. He earned his PhD from Delft University of Technology in 2013, MSc with Distinction in Internet Computing from the University of Surrey in 2007, and BSc in Technology Education and Digital Systems from the University of Piraeus in 2006. His career trajectory includes more than five years of research experience at ETH Zurich after his PhD, roles as a visiting researcher at EPFL, and industry experience at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. At the University of Leeds, he holds a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship funded at £1.4 million and serves as a Research Associate at the UCL Center of Blockchain Technologies. He is a former Alan Turing Fellow and School Representative on the Faculty Research Ethics Committee.

Pournaras's research examines socio-technical systems exhibiting distributed intelligence of human and artificial nature that are trustworthy by design. His interests include distributed intelligence, trustworthy AI, blockchain, collective decision making, digital democracy, computational social systems, Internet of Things, smart cities, smart grids, sustainability, smart mobility, edge computing, logistics, supply chain, and sharing economies. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers in high-impact venues, among them 'Democracy by design: Perspectives for digitally assisted, participatory upgrades of society' (Journal of Computational Science, 2023), 'Society: Build digital democracy' (Nature, 2015), 'Decrypting distributed ledger design—taxonomy, classification and blockchain community evaluation' (Cluster Computing, 2022), and 'Proof of witness presence: Blockchain consensus for augmented democracy in smart cities' (Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, 2020). His accolades encompass the Mentorship Award from the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences (2024), Partnership Award from the University of Leeds (2024), UNESCO IRCAI 2022 Global Top-100 recognition as 'Outstanding' for the Collective Learning project, UNESCO IRCAI 2021 'Promising' for the ASSET project, and multiple best paper awards including for 'Discrete-choice Multi-agent Optimization: Decentralized Hard Constraint Satisfaction for Smart Cities'. He presented his inaugural lecture, 'Another Intelligence: Distributed socio-technical systems to trust for a sustainable and democratic society', on 1 October 2025.