25 July 2024
Remembering Professor Costas Iliopoulos
Tribute to Emeritus Professor Costas Iliopoulos, who died in July 2024.
Costas Iliopoulos became Emeritus Professor in Algorithm Design and Bioinformatics in the Department of Informatics in January 2024, after spending his research career at King's.
During his career he co-authored more than 400 research papers, published in top international journals and presented at conferences.
Professor Iliopoulos started his academic career in Greece, obtaining a BSc degree in Mathematics from the University of Athens in 1980, before moving the United Kingdom to complete his MSc and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Warwick in 1981 and 1983 respectively.
He spent time at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Purdue University before returning to the UK in 1987. He took up a post at Royal Holloway University of London before joining King’s in 1991, shortly after the creation of the Department of Computer Science - now Informatics.
He set up the Algorithms Design Group (now known as Algorithms and Data Analysis), which he successfully led for three decades.
His research interests included ‘stringology’ - focused on algorithms for analysing structure and patters of sequence of characters. He was interested in both the theoretical analysis of algorithm as well as their applications: mainly in the analysis of molecular sequences, within the wider context of bioinformatics, and music analysis.
During his time at King’s, he founded London Algorithms Day and London Stringology Day – both of which he organised for 20 years until Covid-19 disruptions. He frequently appeared at organising and programme committees of conferences and workshops and served as Editor in Chief of the ‘Journal of Discrete Algorithms’ for 15 years. He spent 24 years as the Editor of both the ‘International Journal of Systems Biology and Biomedical Technologies’, and ‘Journal of Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing’.
Through the Algorithms and Data Analysis Group, he supervised 36 PhD candidates and contributed to the supervision of many others throughout his career.
Professor Luc Moreau, outgoing Head of Department of Informatics, said “If you were to single out just one of Costas’s numerous contributions to the department, it would have to be the exceptionally large number of PhD students whom he graduated over the years. The indication of of the scale of this is that there are 23 theses of PhD students supervised by Costas in Pure, where records only started in 2013.”
Throughout his career, Professor Iliopoulos put King’s on the international map of algorithmic research by setting up collaborations France, Italy, Greece, Poland, Final, Czech Republic, Australia, Taiwan, Korea, Bangladesh, South Africa, USA, Canada, Israel and Russia.
He had particularly close research connections with Australia, where for years he held Adjunct Professor positions at Curtin University of Technology and the University of Western Australia.
He retired in January 2024, became an Emeritus Professor of Algorithm Design and Bioinformatics, and was planning to continue his research and the many collaborations he had established worldwide.