Aristotelis-Angelos Papadopoulos, a third-year PhD student in Electrical Engineering at USC Viterbi School of Engineering, has been awarded the Myronis Endowed PhD Fellowship for advanced students. The Myronis Fellowship is designed for students who are making progress in their PhD degree in terms of both quality of work and timing with a preference to Greek students in the fields of Engineering, Medicine, Physics or Chemistry.

Papadopoulos was born in Athens, Greece. He discovered his strong inclination to mathematics and applied sciences early in school by participating in several mathematical competitions. He obtained his 5-year Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Patras in Greece in 2016. During the last 2 years of his undergraduate studies, Papadopoulos specialized in the area of Automatic Control systems and completed a Diploma thesis which resulted in two international conference publications. “This small research experience encouraged me to further pursue a PhD degree and I chose to come to the United States at USC since it is a renowned academic institution,” he shared.

After coming to USC, Papadopoulos began his research on the design of pricing strategies for cooperative optimum routing with simultaneous guarantee for individual incentives for participation. His research topic combines tools from Optimization and Game Theory in order to design pricing strategies that can improve traffic conditions for an individual user as well as system-wide conditions. To achieve that, Papadopoulos is working on designing monetary schemes where drivers who benefit by following their own routing decisions will have to pay a small fee which, proportional to their financial situation, and drivers who are harmed are compensated. He is working on his research under the supervision of USC Electrical Engineering Professor Petros Ioannou and USC Industrial and Systems Engineering Professor Maged Dessouky.

Papadopoulos is also interested in research problems related to Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Specifically, exploring ways to design artificial agents that can use previous knowledge that they have already been trained for in order to acquire new knowledge quickly and acquire as much human intelligence as possible.

The ancient Greek philosopher and the ancestor of Papadopoulos whose name he shares, Aristotle, said – “A real victory exists if a fair play exists. I think this phrase describes best my feelings about getting this Fellowship,” says Papadopoulos. He believes that fair play demands patience, dedication and drives humanity to progress. It is based on the personal effort of everyone who supports human values to achieve a goal which contributes to human progress. Papadopoulos tries to put his own contribution forward and wants to continue doing so and considers this his absolute merit: to achieve victory, while maintaining human values.

“I feel fortunate to have the opportunity to study at USC as a PhD student. In my opinion, it cultivates an essential circumstances towards the direction of fair play and I am grateful for it”.

About the Author:

Adylbek Abdykalikov is a graduate student of International Public Policy and Management Program at USC Price. He has working experience in various positions at the Ministries of Transport and Communication and Investment and Development of Kazakhstan and was in charge of Transportation and Civil Aviation policy development and implementation, and serves as lead student event coordinator for METRANS and PSR.