Gerasimos (Jerry) Spanakis

(DACS)Paul-Henri Spaaklaan 1, 6229EN, C4.013

(LAW)Bouillonstraat 1-3, 6211LH, B2.017B

Maastricht, Netherlands

My name is Gerasimos (or Jerry) Spanakis. You can find a guide to ny name here. Currently, I am an assistant professor at the Department of Advanced Computing Sciences (DACS) and at Maastricht Law+Tech Lab (Faculty of Law), at Maastricht University (UM) in the Netherlands. My current work/research lies at the intersection of Social Computing, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Law, combining fundamental research on Machine Learning, Large Language Models (LLMs), robustness and bias with applied work on socially relevant domains such as legal AI systems, social media transparency and language-centric technologies. My work advances both the scientific understanding of AI systems and their responsible deployment in social, legal and regulatory contexts, building bridges between technical innovation and societal impact.

Current roles/contributions

Member of the research area Cognitive Systems (at DACS/UM)
Member of the Maastricht Law and Tech Lab
PI for the EU project VOXReality
Reseacher at the following projects: NSMD, HumanAds, RegTech4AI
Co-organizer of the Natural Legal Language Processing (NLLP) Workshop
Technical expert for European Commission E-enforcement academy project (supporting Consumer Protection Cooperation (CPC) and Consumer Product Safety (CSN networks)
Coordinator of MaastrichtNLP (MNLP), a reading group for NLP for the whole UM community
Member of the I-research domain of Maastricht University
Member of the Open Science Community Maastricht

news

Oct 15, 2025	I will be giving two talks: Tuesday, 21st October 2025 1500-1630: Artificial Intelligence in Open Science: A YERUN Webinar During International Open Access Week (Panel) - free registration Monday, 17th November 2025: European Institute of Public Administration (EIPA): AI Risk Management
Oct 06, 2025	I will be attending EMNLP in Suzhou 🇨🇳! I will be chairing NLLP workshop and my collaborators and I will be presenting 4 papers: 1) EMNLP-main, led by Pawel “You Are What You Train: Effects of Data Composition on Training Context-aware Machine Translation Models” 📝 Pre-print 💻 Code 2) WMT, led by Abdu “DTW-Align: Bridging the Modality Gap in End-to-End Speech Translation with Dynamic Time Warping Alignment” 📝 Pre-print 💻 Code 3) NLLP, led by Haoyang “Evaluating LLM-Generated Legal Explanations for Regulatory Compliance in Social Media Influencer Marketing” (pre-print coming soon) 4) NLLP, led by Leonard Eßer “Linking Transparency and Accountability: Analysing The Connection Between TikTok’s Terms of Service and Moderation Decisions” (pre-print coming soon)
Jul 25, 2025	I will be attending RANLP 2025 to present: “Dutch CrowS-Pairs: Adapting a Challenge Dataset for Measuring Social Biases in Language Models for Dutch”. This work is the result of the master thesis of Elza Strazda. 📝 Pre-print 💻 Code & data