Nikos Vasilakis | Activities

Teaching

As part of outreach efforts, I have organized courses on distribution-oblivious programming.
(Legend: "h/" == "hosted by:", "w/" == "co-organized with:".)

Course Developer/Instructor Intro to Distribution- Oblivious Programming: Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (h/ Dr. Ngo); University of Buenos Aires, Argentina (h/ Dr. Figueira, Dr. Rodriguez); National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico (h/ Dr. Panayotaros)

Invited Talks

Security in a World of Software Supply-Chain Vulnerabilities: Georgia Institute of Technology, Apr. 2022; University of Maryland, Apr. 2022; UC Irvine, Mar. 2022; Brown University, Mar. 2022; UC Santa Cruz, Mar. 2022; NC State University, Mar. 2022
Supply-Chain Attacks: Challenges and Opportunities: Dagstuhl Seminar 21481 on Secure Compilation, Nov. 2021
Light-Touch Shell-Script Parallelization with PaSh: MIT CSAIL, MA, Feb. 2022; Brown University, Feb. 2022; Boeing MIT Review, Aug. 2020
Library-Oriented Dynamic Analysis: University of Oxford, UK, Aug. 2020; ESPS, UC Louvain, Belgium, Feb. 2019
Retrofitting Security, Module by Module: IMDEA, Spain, May 2021; Northwestern, IL, Aug. 2020; ETH Zurich, Switzerland, Nov. 2019; FORTH ICS, Greece, Nov. 2019; University of Crete, Greece, Nov. 2019; INRIA Paris, France, Jul. 2019; USC/ISI, CA, May 2019; UC Riverside, CA, May 2019; UC Santa Cruz, CA, May 2019; MIT CSAIL, MA, March 2019
Retrofitting Security into Applications with Many Third-party Modules: TU Darmstadt, Germany, Jun. 2018; Athens U. of Econ. and Business, Greece, Jul. 2018; Symantec Research Labs, CA, Feb. 2018; npm Inc., CA, Feb. 2018
Knuth, McIlroy, & You Go to a Party: FORTH CS Institute, Greece, May 2016

Community & Service

Program Committee Member: ACM SCORED, 2022; EdgeSys, 2022; ACM PLDI, 2021; IEEE S&P (Posters & External), 2021; FCS, 2020; EuroSec, 2020
Organizer/Co-Chair: HotOS Panel on The Future of the Unix Shell, 2021
Department Service: CSAIL Postdoc & Graduate Student Council (CPGSC), MIT, 2020; Organizing Committee, Communities-of-Research: Vertical AI, MIT, 2020
Dissertation Committee Member: Grigoris Ntousakis, M.Eng. Thesis, TU Crete, 2020
Broader Mentoring & Outreach: Mentoring Circles, Association for Women In Science (MA); MIT Graduate Application Assistance Program (GAAP); ACM SIGPLAN Long-term Mentorship Program (SIGPLAN-M)
Other Service: EU Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA), Advising on Supply-Chain Threats, 2021

Mentoring

I enjoy collaborating and mentoring immensely—including finding passionate people, working with them, growing together, and achieving common goals. I have been very lucky to work with incredibly gifted students.
(Order: reverse chronological. Legend: "→" == "next position", "→^R" == "next position where I provided recommendation letter".)

Ph.D. students: Konstantinos Kallas (UPenn); Shivam Handa (MIT); Jiasi Shen (MIT); Angeliki Aktypi (Oxford); Max Demoulin (UPenn)
M.Sc. students & post-B.Sc. engineers: Veit Heller (SIGPLAN-M); Achilles Benetopoulos (NTUA →^R Ph.D., UCSC); Dimitris Karnikis (FORTH ICS →^R Aarno Labs)
B.Sc. students: Tammam Mustafa (MIT → M.Eng., MIT); Alizee Schoen (MIT → M.Eng., MIT); Grigoris Ntousakis (TU Crete → M.Sc., TU Crete); Lazar Cvetković (U. Belgrade →^R Ph.D., ETH); Pranjal Goel (UPenn → Goldman Sachs); Yash Palkhiwala (UPenn → Goldman Sachs)
High-school students: Jan Bielak (Staszic school, Warsaw, Poland); Arjun Dixit (Harker school, San Jose, California)

Hobbies

I am deeply interested in all forms of creative expression, and particularly any visual, auditory, and interactive art.

My main contribution in this space was as a founding member of a music duo, Ailo. We released {downtempo, chill-out, ambient, downbeat, lounge} music under several record labels — in Germany, Italy, the UK, Israel, the Netherlands, and Hungary. More than a decade later, you can still find it on Breatport, Spotify, iTunes, Last.fm, Amazon, Google Music, and your favorite vinyl shop. Surprisingly, the process of releasing music under the label of record company is very similar to the process of peer-reviewed conference publication in computer science.

Other interests include art film, sports, photography, history, travelling, teaching, and natural languages.