Thanassis Tiropanis

About

Thanassis Tiropanis is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, where he leads the Data, Intelligence and Society (DAIS) research group. His work builds sovereign, trustworthy data and AI infrastructures — decentralised search, privacy-preserving retrieval, and the governance of algorithmic systems — with applications spanning health, IoT and the wider digital society. Across more than 25 years he has held posts at UCL, Athens Information Technology and Southampton, including a visiting professorship at the National University of Singapore (2017–2019).

Research Interests

• Sovereign & decentralised AI infrastructures
• Privacy-preserving information retrieval
• Data & Web observatories
• AI accountability, bias & transparency
• Distributed analytics for IoT & health

Selected Publications

1. Rethinking information retrieval in a re-decentralised web: exploring the feasibility and quality of search across personal online datastores

   Bahrani, Ragab, Oliver, Tiropanis, Chapman, Poulovassilis & Roussos — 2026 — ACM Transactions on the Web — doi.org/10.1145/3777445

2. Explanation shift: how did the distribution shift impact the model?

   Mougan, Broelemann, Kasneci, Tiropanis & Staab — 2025 — Transactions on Machine Learning Research

3. ESPRESSO: a framework to empower search on the decentralized web

   Ragab, Savateev, Oliver, Tiropanis, Poulovassilis, Chapman & Roussos — 2024 — Data Science and Engineering — doi.org/10.1007/s41019-024-00263-w

4. Awakening the web of self-sovereign data with ESPRESSO: a scoping review of Solid's and Dataswyft's readiness for decentralized private search

   Oliver, Ragab, Savateev, Tiropanis, Poulovassilis, Chapman & Roussos — 2024 — doi.org/10.1049/icp.2024.2536

5. An investigation into the feasibility of performing federated learning on social linked data servers

   Arana, Ragab & Tiropanis — 2024 — doi.org/10.1145/3589335.3651950

6. A dual-layer privacy-preserving federated learning framework

   Huang, Tiropanis & Konstantinidis — 2023 — doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-7254-8_19

Full record (145+ works): University profile · Google Scholar · DBLP

Education & Positions

• PhD, Computer Science — University College London (2001)
• Dip. Eng., Computer Engineering & Informatics — University of Patras, Greece
• Professor of Computer Science, University of Southampton (current)
• Visiting Associate Professor, National University of Singapore (2017–2019)
• Previously: University College London; Athens Information Technology

Recognition & Memberships

• Fellow & Chartered IT Professional, British Computer Society (FBCS CITP)
• Senior Member, IEEE (SMIEEE)
• Fellow, Higher Education Academy (FHEA)
• Member, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Member, Technical Chamber of Greece

Connect

• Email       t.tiropanis@soton.ac.uk
• University  southampton.ac.uk/people/5x5rrv
• Scholar     scholar.google.com/…T0MK3pUAAAAJ
• LinkedIn    linkedin.com/in/tiropanis
• ORCID       orcid.org/0000-0002-6195-2852