Konstantinos Stefanidis

My name is Konstantinos (Kostas) Stefanidis, and I am a Full Professor of Data Science at the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences (ITC), Tampere University, Finland. As the Head of the Data Science Laboratory and leader of the Recommender Systems group at Tampere University, I coordinate interdisciplinary projects and supervise multiple PhD students on fairness-aware AI, recommender systems, data integration and large-scale data management. I have more than 15 years of experience in different research and academic roles at ICS-FORTH in Greece, NTNU in Norway, and CUHK in Hong Kong. I earned my PhD in personalized data management from the University of Ioannina, Greece. 

I have been actively involved in numerous international and national research projects and continue to serve the scientific community. I currently lead the ALTER project (Research Council of Finland), which advances research at the intersection of fairness, explainability, and user interaction in automated decision systems. ALTER develops methods to provide fairness-aware explanations, audit systems to detect latent biases, enable semi-automatic fairness interventions, and support interactive guidance for diverse stakeholders, including users, data providers, and system owners.
Currently, I am the General Co-Chair of MDM 2027, and I was the General Co-Chair of EDBT/ICDT 2026, ADBIS 2025, and TPDL 2025.  

Expertise in: Recommender Systems, Data Integration, Large-Scale Data Management

Collaboration offering: Fairness Auditing & Responsible AIDesign, Recommender Systems Development, Scalable Data Integration

Research focus: Fairness-Aware AI, Explainability, Data-driven Personalization