Prof. Konstantinos Katsikopoulos Diploma and MPhil (Athens), PhD (Massachusetts), FHEA (UK), Fellow of the Psychonomics Society (US)
Deputy Head of Business School for Research and Enterprise, and Professor of Behavioural Science
I am the Deputy Head of the Business School for Research and Enterprise, and a Professor of Behavioural Science.
My work connects behavioural science with analytics: I employ experiments to understand lay and expert decision making under conditions of radical uncertainty; harvest this understanding to build models of how such decisions should be made; and test multiple models using machine learning methodologies. This approach is enjoying a rare success—our models are accurate and at the same time transparent.
My group and I have 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 various approaches, including big data 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.
The puzzles of human and machine decision making will only be solved by interdisciplinary ideas.
I studied applied mathematics and cognitive psychology in Athens and Freiburg and then obtained a PhD in operations research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Before joining Southampton, I was a lecturer at the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at UMass (2 years and 9 months), visiting assistant professor at the Department of Operations Research of the Naval Postgraduate School (3 months) and the Engineering Systems Division at MIT (2 years); as well as a research fellow/scientist and deputy director at the Centre for Adaptive Behaviour and Cognition of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (13 years).