Dr. Psyllidis, A.

Assistant Professor of Location Intelligence
Department Sustainable Design Engineering
Knowledge and Intelligence Design (KInD) group

Achilleas Psyllidis is Assistant Professor of Location Intelligence and Spatial Analysis within the Knowledge and Intelligence Design (KInD) group of the Design Engineering department.

He is also affiliated with the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS), where he leads the Social Urban Data Lab (SUDL), and with the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Center for BOLD (Big, Open, Linked Data) Cities. He is Co-Principal Investigator of the SocialGlass research program.

Leveraging on his multidisciplinary background in architectural engineering, spatial planning, and data science, he is passionate about problems at the intersection of machine learning and urban / regional science. Therefore, he builds computational methods and tools to make sense of and characterize places and people's activities, experiences, and interactions. He further seeks to understand what processes drive their behavior. His methodological approaches are driven by data and informed by theory. He is motivated by how the steadily expanding location ecosystem, fueled by the increasing variety of location data and the advances in technology backing location analytics, can help us better understand human dynamics and potentially improve urban living. He aims to bring Location Intelligence at the core of the design process, through the tools and methods which he develops. With a better understanding of where and why things happen at the places they happen, he believes that designers can create improved products, services, and systems.

Before joining the Industrial Design Engineering faculty, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Web Information Systems (WIS) group, at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science (EEMCS), TU Delft, between 2016 and 2019. He received his PhD in spatial data science in 2016 from Delft University of Technology. His thesis explored how the combination of new forms of urban data could transform our understanding of daily urban dynamics and human activity behavior. To conduct his PhD research, he was awarded with scholarships from the A. S. Onassis Foundation, the European Union Social Fund (ESF), and the Greek State Scholarships Foundation, as well as with individual research grants from the Foundation for Education and European Culture, and the A.G. Leventis Foundation.

• 2012–2016
  PhD in Spatial Data Science, Delft University of Technology. Thesis: "Revisiting Urban Dynamics through Social Urban Data"
• 2009–2011
  MPhil in Spatial Planning (Summa Cum Laude, Highest GPA), National Technical University of Athens
• 2001–2007
  Dipl. Eng. (equivalent to MSc) in Architectural Engineering (Summa Cum Laude, Highest GPA), National Technical University of Athens

• 2020–Present
  Assistant Professor of Location Intelligence and Spatial Analysis
  Knowledge and Intelligence Design group, Industrial Design Engineering faculty, Delft University of Technology
• 2016–Present
  Research Fellow and Head of the Social Urban Data Lab (SUDL), Urban Data and Intelligence, Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS)
• 2016–Present
  Research Affiliate, Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Center for BOLD (Big, Open, Linked Data) Cities
• 2016–2019
  Postdoctoral Researcher, Web Information Systems group, faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science, Delft University of Technology
• 2017–2018
  Research Affiliate, Joint Research Center for Spatial Information, Delft University of Technology and Wuhan University
• 2014–2016
  Research Affiliate, Joint Research Center for Urban Systems and Environment, Delft University of Technology and South China University of Technology
• 2012–2016
  PhD Researcher, faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology
• 2012–2013
  Lecturer on Future Cities, The Why Factory, MVRDV and the Urbanism department of the faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology
• 2010–2012
  Assistant Lecturer, Urban & Regional Planning, and Building Science Labs, National Technical University of Athens