EIRINI MALLIARAKI
ABOUT
eirinimalliaraki@gmail.com
Twitter, Linkedin, Substack
Technologist, researcher, and former founder. I build tools, programmes, and infrastructure at the intersection of AI, frontier science, and public-good innovation. I trained as a design engineer at Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art. Before that, a BSc in Finance from the Athens University of Economics and Business.
Three preoccupations have shaped the past decade: how intelligence emerges and travels across minds, machines, and ecosystems; what infrastructure a field needs to translate knowledge into action; and what it means to build systems that regenerate rather than extract. I've pursued all three — across startups, research labs, national AI institutes, and philanthropy.
I’m based in London, and my email is always open to ethersamplers, epistemic humorists, and ungoogleable souls.
Other curiosities: Complex systems & memetic engineering · Extended cognition · Theorising entanglement · Radical social futures · New learning environments · Community praxis · The Arctic · Soulmaking Dharma · Planetarity · Post-human design · Collective imagination · The surreal · Science Roadmapping
CV
SOCIAL DRONES
Synthetic Temperaments for Autonomous Systems
2016
DESCRIPTION
By 2017, over 770,000 drones had been registered in the US in fifteen months. The technology was proliferating faster than anyone had figured out how to live with it. Unlike pixels on a screen, drones are physical objects that share space with humans. They move through the same air. They can approach, hover, retreat. And yet they had almost no vocabulary for communicating what they were doing or why.
Social Drones proposes one. The project builds an interaction language between humans and flying robots — designing drone behaviours that read human emotion through facial recognition and translate it into interpretable aerial motion. A drone that responds to anxiety by retreating. That mirrors calm with stillness. That signals its intentions through movement rather than sound or light alone. The goal is not to make drones seem friendly; it's to make them legible, so that humans can develop appropriate and calibrated responses to autonomous systems operating in their space.
The implications run in both directions. A drone whose behaviour is interpretable can change the emotional state of the humans it encounters — reducing alarm, building trust, enabling more complex forms of co-operation. But it can also use that feedback loop to navigate its own operational environment more effectively, reading the room and adjusting accordingly. Emergent applications include flying robot actors, synthetic swarms, drone assistants, and autonomous systems designed to work alongside humans rather than around them.
Published at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction 2018. Best Video award at Human Robot Interaction Conference 2018. Featured in Wired, Fast CoDesign, Engadget, Deutsche Welle, IEEE Spectrum, Gizmodo.