Panos Ipeirotis
Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis is a Greek-American computer scientist and the Merchants' Council Professor of Technology and Business at the New York University Stern School of Business. His research focuses on data mining, crowdsourcing, human computation, and the economics of online information systems.
Ipeirotis is a recipient of the Lagrange Prize in Complex Systems and the ACM SIGKDD Test of Time Award. He is known for research on Amazon Mechanical Turk and crowdsourcing quality management, work that has been covered in publications including The Washington Post, MIT Technology Review, and Bloomberg Businessweek.
In addition to his academic career, Ipeirotis co-founded the AI consulting firm
Detectica in 2015, which was acquired by Compass, Inc. in 2019. He has also held research positions at Meta Reality
Labs and Google.
He is also the author of the blog "A Computer Scientist in a Business School," which covers topics in crowdsourcing, data science, and academia; posts from the blog have been cited in academic papers and media coverage.
Education
Ipeirotis earned his Diploma in Computer Engineering and Informatics from the University of Patras in 1999. He pursued graduate studies at Columbia University, receiving his M.Sc. in 2001, M.Phil. in 2003, and Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2004.Academic career
Ipeirotis began his academic career as a graduate research assistant at Columbia University. In 2004, he joined the Department of Information, Operations, and Management Sciences at the New York University Stern School of Business as an Assistant Professor. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2010 and Full Professor in 2016. He holds a courtesy appointment at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and is an associated faculty member at the NYU Center for Data Science.Ipeirotis has held leadership roles in major academic conferences and journals. He served as General Co-Chair of the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing in 2015 and as Technical Program Co-Chair for The Web Conference 2018. He has served on the editorial boards of Management Science and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, and was a founding co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Collective Intelligence launched in 2022 as a collaboration between SAGE Publications, the Association for Computing Machinery, and Nesta.
His research has received coverage in Bloomberg Businessweek, which in 2011 featured his work on combining human and machine intelligence in crowdsourcing systems and in 2013 profiled him as the "data dude" of business analytics.
Research
Ipeirotis's work explores the intersection of computer science and economics, an approach he and collaborators have termed "EconoMining." His research has been published in venues such as Management Science, Information Systems Research, and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.Crowdsourcing and human computation
Ipeirotis is known for his studies on Amazon Mechanical Turk. His 2010 paper "Running Experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk," co-authored with Gabriele Paolacci and Jesse Chandler, established methodological standards for using crowdsourcing platforms in behavioral research and became one of the most frequently cited papers on crowdsourcing methodology, having received more than 6600 citations according to Google Scholar.His research on MTurk data quality gained significant media attention. Studies revealing that approximately 40% of MTurk responses contained spam or low-quality content were covered by Business Insider, MIT Technology Review, and The Washington Post. His 2010 demographic analysis of the MTurk workforce became a widely cited reference for understanding crowd work platforms.
This work led to the development of quality management techniques for crowdsourcing, including the "Get Another Label" framework for improving data quality using multiple noisy labelers, which received the SIGKDD Test of Time Award in 2020.
Data quality and record linkage
Ipeirotis has conducted extensive research on duplicate record detection and data quality. His 2007 survey "Duplicate Record Detection: A Survey" in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, co-authored with Ahmed Elmagarmid and Vassilios Verykios, became a standard reference in the database community with over 2,800 citations.Online reputation and user-generated content
His collaborative work with Anindya Ghose on the economic value of textual content in product reviews quantified the pricing power derived from user-generated content. A related 2011 study demonstrated that the quality of spelling and grammar in product reviews significantly affects perceived helpfulness and product sales. This finding was featured in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Slate, Freakonomics, and Reuters.Applied research and industry
Early industry work (2009–2014)
Beginning in 2009, Ipeirotis was part of the founding data science team at Integral Ad Science, where he helped develop machine learningsystems for detecting inappropriate web content and advertising fraud, using crowdsourcing to generate training data for the models. In 2011, working with AdSafe engineers, he uncovered an elaborate click fraud scheme that used hidden iframes to generate fraudulent ad impressions, which he termed "traffic laundering." The investigation, which estimated the scheme generated hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly, was reported by The Wall Street Journal and MIT Technology Review, and led to an FBI referral.
He also served as Academic-in-Residence at Upwork in 2012 and as a
Visiting Scientist at Google from 2013 to 2014.
Detectica and Compass (2015–2022)
In 2015, Ipeirotis co-founded Detectica with Foster Provost and Josh Attenberg, offering AI strategy consulting and machine learning solutions for business applications. The company developed AI-driven compliance monitoring systems for financial institutions. Prior to founding Detectica, the team had designed and built the founding data science architecture for Integral Ad Science.Detectica was acquired by Compass, Inc. in November 2019. At Compass, the Detectica team developed "Likely to Sell," a predictive analytics system that identifies properties likely to enter the market; the company cited the tool as a significant revenue contributor in earnings calls.
Public engagement and pedagogy
Academic integrity debates
In July 2011, Ipeirotis published a blog post titled "Why I will never pursue cheatingagain," describing his experience catching 22 of 108 students plagiarizing in his
"Information Technology in Business and Society" course using Turnitin software. The post, which criticized the
administrative burden placed on faculty who enforce academic integrity policies, went
viral and was temporarily removed.
The incident sparked national debate about the costs of enforcing academic honesty.
AI-powered assessment
In December 2025, Ipeirotis developed an AI-driven oral examination system usingElevenLabs voice agents to address concerns about students using generative AI
tools to submit perfect assignments while lacking deeper understanding. The system, which cost approximately $0.42 per student
to administer, used a voice AI agent to call students and ask personalized questions
about their submitted work. The experiment
was covered by Business Insider, The Decoder, and educational technology
publications and generated substantial online discussion about the future of educational assessments.