Gerasimos (Jerry) Spanakis

Assistant Professor in Machine Learning/Natural Language Processing

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(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 and 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

news

Oct 15, 2026 📄 Mado Ntekouli (now postdoc at Precision Medicine) will present a paper on tabular foundation models for Ecolological Momentary Assessment Data at BNAIC-BENELEARN 2026! You can read the paper here.
Oct 14, 2026 📄 2 new papers accepted at JURIX 2026!
  • Samyak’s first PhD paper titled “It Depends on the Task: Rethinking Rhetorical Segmentation of Dutch Judicial Decisions”. Pre-print coming soon!
  • Amir’s work during his bachelor thesis (MARBLE) titled Legal Guidance in the Wild: How Users Seek Legal Help in Real-World LLM Conversations. Pre-print coming soon! An (early) demo can be seen here
Oct 08, 2026 ⚖️ JUST-IN kick-off meeting on October 8th/9th. UM’s role will be to design the Embedded Judicial Independence Tracker (EJIT) 📈, an online platform that brings together comparative data on judicial independence across nine jurisdictions 🗺️ and the AI-assisted cross-citation support tool 🤖, which helps judges and lawyers find relevant case law from other countries. Website and more info soon!
Oct 02, 2026 🏳️‍🌈📊 WinoQueer-NL paper has been accepted at GebNLP 2026! This paper brings the first Dutch-language benchmark (based on a community survey) for measuring anti-queer bias in AI language models (work led by master student Jiska Beuk). Pre-print here, data here
Sep 08, 2026 📄 2 new papers (related to speech models) accepted at EMNLP workshops!
  • Abdu’s latest PhD work titled “Align, Integrate, and Fire: Efficient Token-Level Alignment for Zero-Shot SpeechLLMs” will be presented at WMT. Pre-print here.
  • Nicolas Bourrel’s MSc thesis titled “A Probe Shift Is Not a Fairness Fix: The Limits of Representation Steering in Speech Models” will be presented at IMPACT-SPEECH. Pre-print here.