Ilias Diakonikolas is a Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at UW Madison. He obtained a Diploma in electrical and computer engineering from the National Technical University of Athens and a PhD in computer science from Columbia University where he was advised by Mihalis Yannakakis. Before moving to UW, he was an Andrew and Erna Viterbi Early Career Chair at USC and a faculty member at the University of Edinburgh. Prior to that, he was the Simons postdoctoral fellow in theoretical computer science at the UC Berkeley. His research is on the algorithmic foundations of massive data sets, in particular on designing efficient algorithms for fundamental problems in machine learning. He is a recipient of a Sloan Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Google Faculty Research Award, a Marie Curie Fellowship, the best paper award at NeurIPS 2019, the IBM Research Pat Goldberg Best Paper Award, and an honorable mention in the George Nicholson competition from the INFORMS society.