Vassilis Kostakos is an Assistant professor at the Department of Mathematics & Engineering at the University of Madeira, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He holds a BSc and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Bath. He was a member of the Cityware project, and worked closely with the Space Syntax group at the Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL and HP Research Labs. His research has been reported by popular media such as the BBC and New Scientist, and he regularly consults on social networking systems. His current projects address security and privacy for the web, novel sensing techniques for urban transport, sustainability, and modelling of city-scale mobility. His interests include: mobile and pervasive computing, human-computer interaction, social networks, security and privacy, modelling and simulation, epidemics, wireless technologies, and space syntax.