Dr. Maria Terzi

Maria is the Co-Founder & CEO of Malloc. In 2020, she left her position as a Post Doctoral Researcher at KIOS CoE(University of Cyprus), to lead the creation of Malloc and help people and organisations to protect their privacy and secure their data. She advocates against stalkerware and for the protection of privacy. She holds a BSc in Computer Science Innovation and a Ph.D. in Machine Learning and Recommender Systems from the University of Lancaster, funded by EPSRC. She has previously worked as a Software Engineer at Google (Zurich), as an Associate Lecturer at UCLan Cyprus and the University of Cyprus and a researcher at the Cyprus University of Technology and KIOS CoE. Maria has won two two Google hackathons (London 2011,2012), she was selected as a Secure and Private AI scholar by Facebook (2020) and won multiple awards including the the Cyprus Innovation Award in 2019, “Cyprus Entrepreneurship Competition 2020, Faces of Europe 2021” by the European Parliament, “35 under 35”by the European Commission in 2022, and Woman of the Year award at the Innovation Track (MF Awards 2022). Maria is also in the organising teams of hack{cyprus} and CodeCyprus contributing to the evolution of the technological ecosystem of Cyprus.