Dr. Alina Nikolaou is Director and Curator of TEDAI, the exclusive TED Conference 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 and non-profit communications, Alina returned to academia for her doctoral research where she explored how Virtual Reality can affect how we think and behave toward complex sociopolitical issues. 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.

At TEDAI, she curates the annual speaker line-up by searching for our time's wildest, weirdest and most wondrous AI ideas. She has worked with executives and CEO's from the worlds most significant AI companies, artists, digital archeologists, engineers and policy-makers.

​

Alina is also the creator of the (so far unsuccessful) Bring Back Boredom movement and the far more successful poetry club “Poetry Society Vienna”. She 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.