Speaker Bio

Nicolas Kourtellis is a Principal Research Scientist at Telefonica R&D, Barcelona, Spain. He holds a PhD in Computer Science & Engineering from the University of South Florida, USA (2012) and has over 80 published peer-reviewed papers and 6 filed patents. Before Telefonica R&D, he did research at Yahoo Labs, USA, on online user privacy and behavior modeling, Internet measurements and distributed systems. Lately, he focuses on CyberPrivacy (Privacy-preserving Machine Learning (ML) and Federated Learning on the edge, user online privacy and PII leaks)) and CyberSafety (modeling and detecting abusive, inappropriate or fraudulent content on social media using data mining and ML methods, and how they can be applied on the edge on user-owned or network devices). He has served in many technical program committees of top conferences and journals (e.g., WWW, KDD, CIKM, ECML-PKDD, TKDD, TKDE, TPDS, etc.), and presented his work in such top academic and industrial venues including Apache Big Data and Mobile World Congress. His work has been also covered by major news outlets such as Nature, New York Times, The Atlantic, New Scientist, Washington Post, Wired, Vice and others. In 2022, he was ranked among the World’s Top 2% Scientists (2021) in the list prepared by Elsevier BV, Stanford University, USA.