Professor Konstantinos Katsikopoulos

Professor Konstantinos Katsikopoulos

Professor of Behavioural Science

Research interests

  • Human decision making: Prescriptive and descriptive
  • AI decision making: Transparency
  • Behavioural operations: Modeling and prediction of human behaviour

More research

Accepting applications from PhD students.

About

Konstantinos' work connects behavioural science with analytics: He employs experiments to understand lay and expert decision making under conditions of radical uncertainty; harvests this understanding to build models of how such decisions should be made; and tests multiple models using machine learning methodologies. This approach is enjoying a rare success—the models are accurate and at the same time transparent.

Konstantinos' group has developed tools for challenging problems such as identifying threats at security checkpoints in Afghanistan while minimizing civilian casualties, regulating UK investment banks without curbing financial innovation, and predicting the incidence of influenza in the US more robustly than big data. Such psychologically inspired quantitative models help set high standards of transparency and effectiveness for approaches such as machine learning algorithms. With the increasing use of artificial intelligence for decision support, understanding decision rationales is vital, especially in sensitive domains, in future epidemics, and other critical events.