Vassilis Kostakos is Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology. Appointed to this professorship in March 2017, he also serves as Academic Cluster Lead for the Mechatronics, Electronics and Digital cluster since July 2025. His research focuses on human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, pervasive computing, urban computing, smart cities, crowdsourcing, mobile sensing, smartphone usage modeling, digital health, connected health, mental health monitoring, emotion regulation, HCI in healthcare, social networks and interactions, privacy and security in ubiquitous systems, disaster awareness and emergency response, community imaging, IoT and sensor networks, and complex systems in emotions and behavior. Kostakos has made contributions to areas such as using AI to enhance smartphone functionality, including predicting user interactions and optimizing battery life, as well as digital phenotyping and social computing.

Prior to joining the University of Melbourne, Kostakos was Director of the Center for Ubiquitous Computing and Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Oulu from 2011 to 2017. Earlier appointments include Adjunct Assistant Professor at the HCI Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, Assistant Professor at the University of Madeira, postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of Bath, and visiting positions at institutions such as the University of Tokyo, University of California San Diego, and University College London. He is a SIGCHI Academy member, inducted in 2024, and a Marie Curie Fellow. Among his awards are the Brian Shackel Award for best paper at INTERACT 2021, Distinguished Paper Award from IMWUT at UbiComp 2019, Honourable Mention at Australian CHI 2017, Best Full Paper at British HCI 2015, SIGCHI Best of CHI Honorable Mention 2014, and USAID Tech Challenge winner 2013. Kostakos serves as Founding Editor of PACM IMWUT since 2016, chaired the Technical Program Committee for CHI 2019, and co-chaired UbiComp 2024. He has delivered invited keynotes, such as at Northern Health Research Week 2017 and UCL Symposium on HCI Grand Challenges 2016, and instructed workshops including at UBI Summer School 2025 and ACM Summer School on Crowdsourcing 2017. Key publications include 'The Experience Sampling Method on Mobile Devices' (ACM Computing Surveys, 2017), 'Temporal Graphs' (2008), and 'Understanding human-smartphone concerns: a study of battery life' (Pervasive Computing, 2011). His Google Scholar h-index is 61.

Professional Email: vassilis.kostakos@unimelb.edu.au