Periklis (Perry) Papakonstantinou

Periklis Papakonstantinou is a Co-Founder of Grady and serves as its Chief Scientific Officer and AI Ethicist, where he leads the scientific direction of the company's technology and its approach to fairness, privacy, and the responsible use of AI in the classroom. His conviction that the quality of a student's education should not be limited by class size, geography, or resources is central to Grady's mission.

Papakonstantinou joined Rutgers in 2015 as an Associate Professor at Rutgers University, with his main appointment in the Department of Management Science and Information Systems at Rutgers Business School and is also a full faculty member in the graduate school of the Department of Computer Science.

His research is in the foundations of computing, with a particular focus on the foundations of cryptography, data privacy, and information security, alongside computational complexity and the mathematical foundations of machine learning. At Rutgers he has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in data privacy, cryptography and information security, distributed ledgers, databases, statistics, and machine learning.

From 2010 to 2015, Papakonstantinou was a tenure-track assistant professor and PhD supervisor at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences at Tsinghua University, the institute founded by Turing Award laureate Andrew Yao. There he taught in Tsinghua's elite computer science class, known as "Yao class", founded the Laboratory for the Study of Randomness, and advised doctoral students who went on to leading research institutions.

He has taught extensively at Columbia University, University of Toronto, and New York University courses in Cryptography, Information Theory, Data Science, and Mathematics of Computation.

Papakonstantinou earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Toronto, advised by Charles Rackoff, a foundational figure in modern cryptography, where he also completed master's degrees in both computer science and mathematics. His research has appeared at leading venues in theoretical computer science and information security, such as Foundations of Computer Science, CRYPTO, AAAI, ICML, CCS, and his collaboration with Grady co-founder and friend Anastasios Sidiropoulos predates the company by more than two decades.