Alina Nikolaou

Dr. Alina Nikolaou is Director and Curator of TEDAI Vienna, the first TED event in Europe dedicated to Artificial Intelligence.

Born to Greek and Austrian parents, Alina grew up during the financial crisis in Athens, Greece. After school, she moved to Vienna, Austria to graduate with degrees in Communication Science and Political Science. After a short and rather disenchanting journey into the world of advertising, Alina returned to academia for her doctoral research where she explored how Virtual Reality can be used "for good", in other words, to positively influence how we think and behave toward complex sociopolitical issues. (Spoilers, it doesn't really work). Her co-authored study about the influence of deepfakes on media trust and credibility won the award for Best Student Paper at the annual conference of the International Communication Science Association in 2023. Alina has held several courses at the University of Vienna, ranging from empirical research methods in the Social Sciences to Media History. Her work has been featured in the Annals of Communication Science and AWE EU .

Alina holds a Bakk.phil, MSc and Dr.phil. in Communication Science as well as a BA in Political Science from the University of Vienna, Austria.